My youngest two are at that nursery age where they spend a vast amount of time singing songs, their favourite being, “Miss Polly had a dolly” and OH how apt that song has been in the last 24 hours. I have been very unwell, and at 26 weeks pregnant was getting commands to go into hospital for an anti-sickness injection. Unfortunately hubby can’t drive and our hospital is a half hour drive away so I buried my head in the sand and slept all day instead. I am so rarely ill that I just can’t cope with it but the children bring every bug in the world home. Ah, the joys of parenting.

I promised yesterday that I would maybe post up the wool I dyed last week (tomorrow!) and some baking, and it occured to me that in my entire blogging career I’ve only posted one savoury dish. Unfortunately this is fairly representative of my domestic leanings because I really am not a natural cook. Hubby is responsible for dinner in this house and has been shocked that not once but TWICE in the last week he has come home from work and I’ve had dinner ready. The cheeky sod. Alas, I have not photographed by culinary exploits but suffice to say I made stew and the kids ate it. Hooray! I think it was the novelty element myself

Baking wise, I’m going to show you some Norwegian Cinnamon Buns I made courtesy of my much-loved Nigella Lawson. These were okay but not really what I was looking for. I love cinnamon buns that have icing smeared on top, gooey and sticky-sweet. This was not that kind of cake. That said, this recipe made 20 buns and they were gone within 24 hours so they couldn’t have been that bad. They got a little burnt due to a communication error with hubby (his fault!) but that didn’t affect the taste.

Recipe
For the dough:
600 g flour
100 g sugar
½ tsp salt
21 g easy blend yeast or 45 g fresh yeast
100 g butter
400 ml milk
2 eggs

For the filling:
150 g soft, unsalted butter
150 g sugar
1 ½ tsp cinnamon
1 egg, beaten, to glaze

Roasting tin approximately 33cm x 22cm or large brownie tin, lined with baking parchment bottom and sides

Preheat the oven to 230°C/ gas mark 8.
Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk it into milk and eggs, then stir it into the flour mixture. Mix to combine and then knead the dough either by hand or using the dough hook of a food mixer until its smooth and springy Form into a ball, place in an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave it to rise for about 25 minutes.

Take one-third of the dough and roll it or stretch it to fit your tin; this will form the bottom of each bun when it has cooked. Roll out the rest of the dough on a lightly floured surface, aiming to get a rectangle of roughly 50×25cm. Mix the filling ingredients in a small bowl and then spread the rectangle with the buttery cinnamon texture. Try to get even coverage on the whole of the dough.

Roll it up from the longest side until you have a giant sausage. Cut the roll into 2 cm slices which should make about 20 rounds. Sit in rounds in lines of top of the dough in the tin, swirly cut-side up. Don’t worry if they don’t fit snugly together as they will swell and become puffy when they prove. Brush them with egg and let them rise again for about 15 minutes to let them get duly puffy.

Put in the hot oven and cook for 20-25 minutes, by which time the buns will have risen and will be golden brown in colour. Don’t worry it they catch in places. Remove them from the tin and leave to cool slightly on a rack-it’s easy just to pick up the whole sheet of parchment and transfer them like that-before letting people tear them off, to eat warm.

Makes 20

Posted under baking, family, recipes

My husband is an absolute superstar, he really is. I’m really enjoying this blog at this location although I still have a bit of work to do in terms of designing the template, reordering my categories & tags and so on. I have also been keeping an eye on the visitor stats for the blog using Google Analytics and have had a really nice trickle of visitors over the last few days. Please, say hello! Otherwise I don’t know what you like and/or don’t like!

Anyway. Over the last couple of days I’ve also been exploring other UK-based crafty forums and blogs which has been really exciting. Of the 93 blogs I subscribe to with bloglines 35 of them are UK based. Why do I find this so exciting? Simply because our counterparts in other countries have access to a wide range of materials that we just can’t get here, and I like to see what the UK crafters are able to do with what we have available.

On that note, I was extremely excited to read this blog entry by Manda at Tree Fall Design. She is going to be editing a brand spanking new sewing magazine being published for the first time in October called Sew Hip. If you’re not a regular reader of Manda’s blog, I urge you to go and look – she is enormously talented and her blog is just a thing of beauty.

I’ve also joined a couple of UK crafting forums – Crafteroo and Crafts Forum after being linked to the latter by Jen of Flurogoddess fame. All very exciting and hopefully places I can learn great things.

So, in other news I am leaving work at the end of October. I love my job but it has been a very different job than I really want so when I was told the funding had run out for my contract it was actually a relief rather than a shock. There is so much I’ve had to sacrifice doing in order to work and once Bob & I worked out we were making less than £30 a week by the time we paid childcare and travelling costs we decided it wasn’t worth me going back to work for the moment. I have applied for a part time evening job but we’ll see how that pans out too. This of course means I’m finally going to be able to return to the knitting group at Tchai Ovna with Purple Jen and Angela which I’ve sorely missed with being at work.

My last interesting piece of news is I’ve dyed my hair pink! With the help of my good friend Kat, I’ve gone ‘Flamingo pink’. It’s… different, to say the least! You can see it in the last entry, that pink-haired demented looking freak is me clutching my new niece. Haha.

Posted under general crafty updates