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Pp has got into poached eggs, and would like to eat them with (English) muffins. 

Asda had no muffins at all (they had about 7 different kinds of crumpet, and zero muffins), so I bought a bag of spelt flour instead and made these wholemeal spelt muffins instead: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/wholemeal-spelt-english-muffins-recipe ;

Have never cooked bread in a frying pan before, but it seemed to work. 

I've only eaten one so far, but it was delicious. Think I should make half quantities though: nine muffins at once is a lot of muffins. 

 

Saturday was Pp's birthday.  I had promised to make a cake and a meal, which I did, with some success in the most important department (taste) but less success in the visuals.  I intended to make a chocolate tower-cake, but my tower proved structurally unsound, and even the addition of a bamboo skewer did not entirely prevent listing and eventual crackage. 

We watched the Coronation (well, I went out and walked the hounds for part of it, but I got back in time to see the Drumming From a Horse, which was my personal highlight of the event.  That and the mounties, who against stiff competition, I think had the best horses. ) 

The forecast was for rain, but in fact the sun smiled all afternoon.  I mowed a lawn. I had intended to try for No Mow May, again (in which you don't mow till the start of June to allow time for the lawn to flower) but I think the wetter spring and dog pee combination had resulted in grass that was too lush to favor wildflowers.  So I've mowed all but the spots where I have camomile and yarrow growing, and I have done my best to mow around those.  I think I'll have to try to mow once in March next year, that might knock the grass back for long enough to let the wildflowers do their thing. 

I have a bunch of plants in pots that I really must plant out soon.  Still, a few more days won't hurt them. 

The local street party was a fairly laid-back beach party on Sunday (due to the forecast for Saturday being dismal) so we dropped by that briefly to admire the fire and chat with a few people. After that, we went out on the river in the boat, and journeyed upstream on the tide many miles, to the very fringes of Haverfordwest.  There was a fraught moment when we had to change the petrol tank and  couldn't work out why the engine wouldn't re-start afterwards, but it was resolved happily.  We do have an emergency paddle, but it would have been a long paddle home.



I've been oddly exhausted since Sunday and keep finding myself forced to stop and nap: unfortunate, since today I was dealing with a wrangle with the Oldies Club email that involved a teleconference with Google, and the Shop on the Borderlands had 28 orders to pack today, including a huge one to Australia. Still, we got it done, despite the minor niggle that the Royal Mail parcel-picking-up service is terribly glitchy and you never know when you'll have to just haul everything off to the sorting office. At least the sorting office has given us permission to ignore the 'no parking' signs when we come in with a car-load of post to send. We are allowed to park in one of the official van slots, as long as the vans are out delivering at the time. 

Is not behaving in quite the way the instructions suggested (ie, it rises, but not yet doubling in size) so so far, I have not tried making it into bread.

It does make good crumpets though. 

In my quest for foods that are a bit less carbohydratey, I have been
Coconut flour is not pancakeable. Not even if soaked overnight and combined with eggs and slow-cooked to encourage coagulation. Do not try to make pancakes with it. The results are grim.

Have moved on to buckwheat flour (not a wheat, despite the name, but a relative of the rhubarb.) She makes pretty good pancakes, but not as good as Spelt flour (which IS a kind of wheat, despite the name.)

At present, Spelt is my favorite of the Weird Flours.

We spent Easter in Essos, the sister continent of Westeros from the universe of Ice and Fire.  Here we are setting off (perspective is deceptive! the first ship was by far the biggest really! )

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I meant to write up what we did, but unfortunately I was, and am, a bit under the weather (I severely disapprove of a bug that not only makes me impossibly sleepy but also makes my asthma unusually severe and wheezy, honestly, I feel like I've abruptly aged about 30 years and put on three stone) so I'm just going to link to LoA's writeup so I can find it later.   In fact, I am so wheezy and achy I haven't even photographed my other drawings of the campaign, although partly due to the wheezing, sleeping, aching etc, those I managed were a bit crap anyway, to be honest.  I quite like this one though: it's us all setting off in our cog, the Lady Anduin, with a cargo of whippets, tin, mead, amber, stockfish, candlesticks, silver grumpkins and furs:

( The Lady Anduin. )

As has become traditional, chainmailmaiden made a sumptuous mass  of awesome foods.  A few of them stayed on the plates long enough to be photographed.  I had to photograph the Baked Alaska super-fast though, before it escaped.   Fortunately, Pp had got me a new (to me) ancient (because all my lenses are from the last century) manual-focus lens for my birthday,  which is well-adapted to the swift photography of escaping food.

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Watching Doctor Who yesterday, I learned that Santa considers the tangerine to be his signature gift.

When I was a child, I'm pretty sure that Father Christmas (not Santa) brought a satsuma, not a tangerine.   I love satsumas.  I buy bags and bags of them when they are in season, and eat them until I start feeling really quite orange.  It's surprising, but sort of charming too,  that in an era when you can buy all sorts of fruit out of season all year round, the Season of the Satsuma is so short.

What I think of as a satsuma is Citrus Unshiu and although that Wikipedia entry doesn't mention it, I'm sure I've read an article saying that this particular fruit is disproportionately popular here in Britain, where we like the sweetness and the ease of peeling, and have less stern and demanding tastebuds than other nations who apparently are more likely to prefer more subtle and less sugary citruses. So, we give them at Christmas: hence the 'Christmas orange' name.

What I think of (and I *think* generally what greengrocers and supermarkets sell as tangerines, is Citrus Tangerina - a pleasant enough fruit, but not quite so easy to peel, and the skin has a different texture and flavour (I like the skins too!)

[Poll #1993464][Poll #1993464]

Incidentally, I just learned from that Wiki article that a mature satsuma tree is hardy down to -9C.  -9!  It NEVER goes to -9 here.  I wonder how much frost protection they need before they get big....? 

I stumbled across one of these '18 mug cake' type articles, and thought: Mmmmm.  Cake.  But then I looked at the recipes, and some of them were a bit yuk, or demanded ingredients not easily available in this country etc etc, so I looked for others that might be easier to make.  These are what I ended up with.   I used to have a lot of mug cakes when I was a student whose primary cooking tool was a microwave - but I've forgotten most of the recipes I used to use now.

Lemon mug cake.  This would make more sense if it had a whole lemon in it, or half a lemon.    What gives with these recipes that use odd little quantities of a whole fruit, do people really make lots of mug cakes and serve them to people?  Not sure microwaves are designed for cooking groups of mugs, if you are cooking for volume, why not just make cupcakes in a tray designed for the job?

Raspberry mug cake with coconut flour - I fancy this enough that I may actually buy some coconut flour, although I suspect it of being an overpriced novelty -you never know until you try, right?

Editing to add...

I just made this cake!
 3tbsp of banana (ie, more or less one mashed banana), a whole egg, a tbsp and a half of coconut flour -  turns out that is actually way more than will fit into a normal sized mug, and I note that the photos actually show the cake in a large ramekin rather than a mug.  

I could just have got the mix into a normal mug, but it would have spilled everywhere as it rose.  I used a super-sized mug, which was about half-full when I put it into the microwave, and about full when I took it out.  However the cake did not cook through in 2 minutes, and I think I should have given it another 20 seconds.

I could definitely taste the banana and coconut as well as the raspberry, and the texture was noticeably fibrous, although not unpleasant.   I was a little surprised that the cake was not particularly sweet, despite all that banana, honey and sweet vanilla.

Apple cinnamon mug cake Nice idea, dubious about the requirement for apple sauce, why not just chop apple and use that?

Salted caramel mug cake.   Wins points for common sense for not telling you to use unsalted butter and then add salt like some of the silly recipes, but on the other hand you have to have to make some salted caramel sauce, and I'm fairly sure that could be done more easily in a mug.

 I'm not sure about this Lime Coconut cake : it looks tasty, but it just seems like however many of them you made, you'd end up with either an awkward quantity of coconut milk, or an awkward half-lime.

I guess this is really what a pinterest is supposed to be for but it seems to make more sense to just pile everything in a jumbled heap here. 

Decided to give this hazelnut syrup recipe a try. It would have made sense to do this in the autumn when I could have picked the hazelnuts, but I didn't get around to it then so I bought a bag of them instead. I adapted the recipe to use:
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