Steam fair

A fantastic outing to the steam fair!

Purple velvet cupcakes

Last week everyone was very helpful in the lab and got me through a rather important experiment. So I made them some of these scrummy cupcakes from the good food mag. We picked blackberries from opposite the house too, so a local treat!

Take 150g blackberries and crush them with a fork. Melt 100g butter and 100g dark chocolate (mine was a supermarket brand at about 40% so not that dark) gently together. Mix 225g self raining flour, 175g caster sugar and two tablespoons of cocoa powder (I used green and blacks) in a large bowl. Beat two eggs with a teaspoon of chocolate extract (this was an extra addition I made to the original recipe). Then add the melted butter and chocolate and eggs and blackberries to the dry ingredients with a little red/purple food colouring. Mix everything together into a smooth batter and apportion to 12 cupcake cases. Bake at 180C (160C fan) for 15mins or until a skewer comes out clean. 

(The recipe recommended the following for the icing. I think it's a bit much and could easily be halved but then it depends on how much icing you like!) Press 150g blackberries through a sieve to extract the juice. Beat together 100g soft butter and 400g icing sugar with 1tsp vanilla essence. This is very very stuff. Mix in enough of the juice to make it pipable. I made the mistake of mixing it all in at once and it was a bit runny so take your time! If you have any spare blackberries put one on the top before serving. 

Moomin house - Tove Jansson's centenary

To celebrate 100 years since the birth of Tove Jansson, author of the fabulous moomin books, we baked a moomin house and cooked onion tart and tomato salad from her cookbook.

David Austin Roses

To go in our front garden we wanted to buy some fragrant roses. So we headed off to David Austin Roses near Telford. What beautiful place to visit! We had a fabulous moring exploring the gardens, sniffing the roses, eating tasty treats and ended up with three delightful roses - Sofie, Darcy and Gertrude!