Stash Avalanche

I'm still here!

Thought I'd better holler a brief hello in between feeds, just so that you know I haven't completely disappeared under a sea of nappies!

This week seems to be a lot busier than last week, or perhaps I should say, this week there has been less time to do things, mostly because I've been trying to sleep more. You can only function on adrenaline and muesli for so long!

There has been no time for crafting - the cat net is still unfinished (but fortunately the cat is too freaked out by Baby S to even think about a snooze on his head!) as is a cardigan I haven't even mentioned here yet and the footmuff which, I'm embarrassed to say, has been lying on the kitchen table with the sewing machine for nearly a month now. It probably only needs another half an hour spent on it but I haven't found that yet, let alone any time for tidying!

I have been trying to get out to take some photos of all the blossom that has sneaked out whilst I've been busy but yesterday the sky was a very unphotogenic grey and today, coming back from the doctor (a routine check up for Baby S where he was pronounced cute, enormous and very healthy),  feeding time was somewhat more urgent. So. Perhaps tomorrow...

Today's accomplishment is a stew, requested by Mr G who was complaining that he feels like all he's eaten for the past 2 weeks is sandwiches. I know how he feels!

Baby S has been keeping us up with 2 feeds during the night but the doctor suggested cluster feeding in the evenings (rather like cluster bombing but with milk) in order to get him to sleep through better. If this works, I'll hopefully be back on the knitting, crocheting and blogging with a bit more frequency, and there'll be less of the falling asleep in front of CSI. Fingers crossed!

ps. If everyone could stop blogging for about a month I'b be very grateful - there are over 600 posts in my feed reader and I'm managing to read about 3 a day!

 

Multi-tasking

Here is yesterday's corner of micro-chaos, also known as the kitchen table. My Burda dress is waiting to have the bias binding sewn onto the armholes and there's a half made spool holder on the go too.

So today's tasks are finish the dress (I need to make more bias for the neck) and maybe even dye it, and get some screws for the spool holder (because the ones that came with it are a whole centimetre TOO SHORT - extra big grumble there), and finish that too.

Let's see how far I get, shall we...

Appliqué flowers

Hello.

You might remember that a few posts back I was telling you the reasons why Spring Top #1 came into existence. One of those reasons was because the nice one I had made a couple of years ago doesn't fit me at the moment (see? I'm being optimistic here). And thinking about that led me to thinking about a door curtain that I made for my little cottage in Suffolk, and if you're wondering what the one has to do with the other, the answer is appliqué flowers. Would you like to see?

Where I lived in Suffolk was very rural, in the middle of forests and heaths, and one consequence of this was that there were lots of insects flying about. Insects that liked me a lot. Boah, I have never been bitten by so many things as when I lived in Suffolk! So I decided to make a door curtain, so that I could have the door open, but fewer biting things could get in and chew on me.

I made it with a sort of cross between cheesecloth and muslin (in a natural calico colour which doesn't really show in the photos), and to make it a bit more interesting, I appliquéd self-coloured flowers on it, like this...



I call this shadow appliqué, but when I Googled this term, it came up with a somewhat different technique(see here for instance). 

I don't have any photos of the curtain up in my cottage so I draped it over the curtain rail this afternoon and tried to produce at least some semblance of what it would have looked like...



Can you see the little beads at the bottom? I sewed those on to add some weight to the curtain because it would blow about quite a lot.

Having sort of invented this decoration in my head and decided I liked how it worked, I used the same idea on the bias top I made a few years ago. I had bought several colours of very light, almost semi-sheer cotton when I was in Suffolk, with the idea of making little sleeveless blouses with frills down the front, but that still hasn't happened. Instead, the red got turned into this bias top...



The pattern is Burda 8987 which has since been discontinued. It's a simple bias top with facings, and a slit and button at the back. As you can see, I didn't use either of those! I used a matching (shop-bought) bias binding around the neck and armholes, and the top was easy enough to pull on without needing an opening in the back. 

Because the fabric is very light, I decided to put a bit of extra coverage over the bust and my shadow appliqué flowers seemed like a good idea. I had to put the bust darts in first, and then, because I wanted at least one of the flowers to go right up to the neck opening, I had to put the neck bias on too. So the appliqué was pretty much the last thing I did.



And it really isn't this sheer, but I have to show you this photo too, because I think the effect is so pretty...



We needed a door curtain again when we moved to Ireland (not to keep out the critters, but for a bit of privacy), but of course the cottage curtain didn't fit, so I made another. This time out of a white muslin, and with fewer flowers because I was feeling impatient...



(That criss-cross-y thing in the door is a paper cut-out I did, but I'll tell you about that another time). The flowers have much fatter petals than the first curtain, but you get the same sort of effect.



I made two this time, one with a few less flowers than the other, so that you can open them on both sides of the glass doors. And that one there had a fight with a bike or something as soon as it went up, hence the crappy black marks on it. Grumble.

Anyway, here's a kind-of, not-really-a-tutorial kind-of tutorial for this technique. I was going to include it in the body of this post, but it turned out longer than I thought, and I didn't want to write War and Peace again!

Happy Thursday!

The Book of Egg Cookery

Did I tell you I love this book? Oh, yes, I did. But did I show you how wonderful it is? Ah well, you see, the cake took precedence. Well, not in this post. 

Just so we are clear: I LOVE THIS BOOK. 



My mother got this when I was very little. Possibly from the milkman (who used to sell eggs) or possibly by saving up coupons on egg boxes. I can't remember and neither can she. It was produced by the British Egg Marketing Board, which Wikipedia says was set up in 1956 to encourage sales of eggs. These were the people who started printing lion logos on the egg shells as a mark of quality. The book was published in 1969, and the organisation folded in 1971, so I feel like it is an heirloom to be treasured. I also thought that about the Golden Hands Encyclopedia of Crafts which my mother sent to jumble, but that's another story. Humpf.

This book has everything you could possibly want to know about eggs, what they are, why they do what they do (thicken, bind, emulsify...). It tells you what you can do with them, and there are little anecdotes scattered throughout the pages (like this quote from Mark Twain: "nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs". Isn't that great?). It is illustrated with photographs of beautiful plasticine models, like that chicken on the cover, and wonderful Seventies drawings like this wizard demonstrating the art of whipping egg whites...



There are little mini-chapters on how to do basic things like how to cook eggs as eggs (I mean boiling, poaching, scrambling...), different sorts of omelettes, custards (which is where I went for the Donauwelle ), batters, souffles... and then a set of recipe chapters divided into the standard titles like Soups ans Starters, Cheese, Desserts etc.

Why do I love this book so much? It has all the basics. It has nice straightforward recipes (apart from a few Seventies odd-balls). I grew up with it. It is laid out nicely (I have a thing about layouts, but I won't bore you). But mostly because it is, for me, an epitome of the Seventies. Call me odd but I never thought that it was a decade for time to forget. I always wanted to be the girl in the balloon eating Nimble bread, or the girl with flowing hair in the hay field drinking Eden Vale Drinking Yogurts which came in a plastic pot shaped like a medieval goblet. As a small child looking on, it was a decade of exuberance, bright colours, flowing dresses, and romance (of an Eden Vale Drinking Yogurt kind) (oh, and Marc Bolan). And this wonderful book sums these things up for me. In the images, in the writing, and even in some of the recipes.

How can you not fall for pages like these...



I wonder what all those kids are doing now.



Theme and variations, and what-went-wrong guides.



Illustrated recipes with variations.



 And plasticine models. Of course.

Some of the information may be out of date, the recipes may occasionally vere towards Fanny Craddock, the images may be dated (but in a good way), but I still use this book regularly, I still make dishes from it, and I can't see myself stopping any time soon.
 
The one sad thing? It doesn't have an ISBN number (or at least I can't find one), so there is no official copy somewhere in the British Library to be saved and loved and cherished by generations to come. Am I over doing it? Exaggerating even? Perhaps, but it is an egg cookery book.

Donauwelle

Hello! It's a long time since I've done a post on cake, and I had intended to do one every Saturday (our official cake day here at StashAvalanche Mansions), but that fell through, mostly because we had a lean period of not much cake. 

So. This is a post which starts off with Ikea, has cake in the middle, and ends up all retro and nostalgic. You may want a cup of tea in the middle because the cake is pretty gooey, but see how you feel, ok?

Ever since Ikea started doing their Stolmen range, I had ideas running through my head about a cat tree. Not one of those horrible furry ones (actually if anyone wants one for free please let me know), but something a bit less interior-design-challenging. And finally in January, I did something about it. This was partly because I still didn't have a job(and therefore had time), and partly because via  Modern Cat I discovered the fabulously chic Hollywood Cat Tower which spurred me on. So I got out my jigsaw and made a mess in the living room for a few days, and this is the result.


 
I put it by the back door so the Grey Cat can watch the world go by. Anyway, why am I telling you this in a post which is supposedly about cake? Because of the light. I have perfect light here for photos for this blog, often even when we are having a grey day, and one of the steps is just the right height for me to get close-ups without having to bend over double then wobble the camera like crazy. A perfect place, therefore, to take photos of the Donauwelle (see? I told you this was about cake) and if you look carefully you'll spot the cat tree in other posts too.

A certain someone, who will remain nameless because they don't like these things to be mentioned, had a birthday the other day, so I made Donauwelle. Something foreign? Yes. Something with doughnuts? No.

Donauwelle is German for Danube Waves and it's a popular cake in Germany (and judging from Google, the US as well). It's a vanilla and chocolate sponge cooked with fresh or tinned (ie, not candied) cherries and then topped with a kind of custard cream and a thin smear of chocolate. As the cake bakes, the cherries sink through the sponge which causes a ripple/wave effect when you cut the cake. You can get it at practically any baker in Germany, where it will look (invitingly) like this...



(source)

See how the cherries make the Welle in the sponge? 

I had a nose round on the internet to look at recipes, and it turns out the cake is pretty much a standard sponge mix, although I have to admit that I was lazy and only looked at sites in English. The cream topping is 'vanilla pudding' which seems to be available in packets in the US (and of course in Germany); the only thing I could think of as an English equivalent is blancmange, which to me, on cake, is not very appertising. I'm not going to provide you with a detailed recipe because a) it's pretty straightforward and b) the cake wasn't an entire success so perhaps you should read on and wait for a better version.

So I made a 3 egg sponge (oh, go on then, 3 eggs and 6oz (sorry but imperial always seems to work best here) of butter, self-raising flour and caster sugar, with a splosh of vanilla extract and 2oz of ground almonds for moistness), spread half of it in a 10" square tin, mixed 3tbs of cocoa with the rest and spread that on top. Then I dotted a drained can of black cherries (ideally these should be sour cherries but hey, I live in Ireland) and stuck it in the oven for half an hour. The cake cooked. The cherries sunk. By about 5mm. Hmmm. I was not impressed. I soldiered on. I had a deadline.

What to put on top was the next question. And here we come to the The British Egg Marketing Board . How I love them. Somehow, don't ask me how (and don't ask my mother either, because I'm sure she won't remember), my ma got a book from them, The Book of Egg Cookery. You probably had to save empty egg shells or something, and send them to an address in Birmingham. Anyway....



Isn't that fabulously Seventies? Dont you just loke that chicken? It's made of plasticine! I LOVE THIS BOOK, but more about that in another post (get on with it?).

It has loads of good basic recipes including custard and all it's myriad of variations, and one of them is for Creme Saint-Honore, which is pastry cream mixed with whipped cream. The pastry cream is basically a flour-based custard and I followed the measurements in the book: 2oz sugar, 2 egg yolks, 1oz plain flour and half a pint of milk. This came together pretty well and with no lumps when I cooked it, but there didn't really seem to be enough to cover a 10" square cake. So I mixed in half a pint of whipped cream and that looked better volume-wise. That went onto the cake and was followed by a layer of melted chocolate and butter (the US recipies use oil but I wasn't too keen somehow). Then I put the whole thing in the freezer for an hour because aagh! the person who wishes to remain nameless was due home very soon and I wanted the cake to be edible upon their arrival.

The Arrival happened. The cake was presented. We tried to cut the cake. Lesson 1: use a thinned layer of  chocolate and use the oil then you won't need a pick axe to make headway. Lesson 2: Creme Saint-Honore does not work (either that, or it didn't turn out like it should); it's too runny. Possible lesson 3: don't put warm sponge in the freezer; the consistency of the sponge was more like a brownie that something light and airy. We did, eventually, cut the cake. It looked a bit of a bomb site but we ate it.



I stuck the cake on the cat tree and took a photo of it (you see? there was a point to all that rambling). And the person who wishes to remain nameless proclaimed it a very good first attempt. And it did make waves, even though the cherries refused to sink.



Ok, so I managed to not get very retro and nostalgic, and mostly stay on the topic of cake. I think this would have been an even more confusing post, if I hadn't reined myself in. Ah, but you see, there is another post coming up shortly....

A small amount of frustration

A few weeks ago now, I decided I needed an Etsy fix. Etsy is like an enormous on-line craft market and has been a life saver for me in terms of buying decent fabrics. I spend endless hours window shopping and trying to think of reasons why I just have to have that piece of material, or that fabulous yard of ribbon or flowery bias binding. Oooh, I love flowery bias binding.

Anyway, I ended up ordering Grand Revival's Stella apron from Fashioned by Meg and some fabrics from Vintage Chic Boutique and Freshly Squeezed Fabrics, and was itching to sew as soon as I'd placed the orders. But of course, everything takes time and comes from the USA so I was pacing the living room in anticipation of the postman for what felt like ages. 

The pattern arrived first and I was so desperate to sew that I ended up going to Cath Kidson  and buying a remnant of beige spotty furnishing fabric to do a trial run. It was a bit of a disastrous trip actually, because they were still in the middle of their January sale so I ended up with two bags as well. Bags and me are a bit of a dangerous combination to be honest. I can't say I'm a big fan of CK's floral stuff, but there was a blue spotty bag that just wouldn't let me leave the shop without it.



I had to hang it on the back door to get a decent amount of light.

Anyway, the parcel arrived and I found the time to cut out the pattern and start making some bias binding, (just out of plain calico), and then life got in the way, and I had to do More Important Things (apparently there are such things but I am not convinced) so I've spent the whole week not sewing, which was very frustrating indeed.

But there is a silver lining to the cloud. I had to tidy up, and there were half knitted Things all over the living room - my excuse is that they're all works in progress. They are. Really. So I just had to make something to put them all in, which can stay in the living room but enable people to sit on the sofa. I used the rest of my CK fabric and despite several fights between me, the Vilene lining, and several hundred pins, I think the result was worth the blood shed.



And it holds everything.



And it looks nice. So I think I am happy. Now back to my apron and the bias binding. I'll let you know how I progress.