home making

Therapeutic baking. The other day I stood in the little front garden of this new house and pulled out the weeds that were choking the crocuses and dwarf narcissi. The smell of fresh earth hit me and I remembered how good gardening is for the soul. Today I listened to Radio 4 and baked and it was good.

Cupcakes ready to go.

Blueberry muffins (recipe below, they’re really easy and a million times nicer than the horrible oily ones you get in shops).

Not sure how long this lot will last. But they look pretty with their lilac and pale pistachio coloured icing. Someone seems to have eaten all the sprinkly things from my baking cupboard, though. Several someones, I suspect.

Photos above all taken with iPhone because my camera is dead. A new one is stupendously expensive. It might be fixable, but it looks like the cost of fixing it might be more than my battered old Canon is worth. Sob.

Blueberry Muffins

Preheat oven to 190c, 375F or Gas 5.

You need 300g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp bicarb of soda
a pinch of salt
2 beaten eggs
175g light brown sugar
250ml natural yogurt (or buttermilk would work, and milk at a push but reduce the quantity a bit)
125ml melted butter
1tsp vanilla extract
175g blueberries

Put the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a biggish bowl
Mix the melted butter, eggs, yogurt, sugar and vanilla in another bowl
Mix the two together, adding the blueberries, and just fold it together a bit (lumpy and bits of flour is fine, undermixing is worse than overmixing these)
Divide them into 12 muffin cups and bake for about 12 minutes.

I can’t remember where I originally found this recipe but I’ve been using it for so long I know the quantities off by heart. You can also do banana (a couple of over-ripe bananas mashed) or chocolate chip (big handful and a mouthful for the cook) or (yum) raspberry and white chocolate chips.

June in the garden

It’s another cup of tea post.

It’s a very British thing, weather. A drought was announced, causing huge problems for farmers across the south of England, and it then proceeded to pour with rain for ages, so the garden has gone all jungly but it’s too wet to cut the grass. And the whole of yesterday was so winter-ish that I spent it in bed, writing and drinking tea. Mainly drinking tea, actually, but don’t tell.

We had a little moment of summer this morning after the rain. There’s a recipe for redcurrant jelly here if yours are getting ripe too – not quite sure what you do when you’re leaving the country. I suppose I could just make it all, and give it to friends as something to remember me by? Summer without making jam seems like a strange idea.

Not much chance of making jam with the strawberry harvest. That’s it, so far. The red one was delicious.

Not as delicious as the tiny little wild strawberries we have in a pot, though.

Borage flowers. How something so pretty can grow from such a thuggish plant amazes me. One of them has elbowed its way into the border, shoving my demure little chives out of the way, and telling a rose bush to budge up.

Jungle path. If I was a child, I’d love this. I love it anyway.

The garden in June. You can compare it with the garden at Easter. Funny how things grow when you’re not looking. Like children.

I’ve been so busy that I’ve forgotten to do about a million things this week. This is one of them:

You can vote for me here if you are feeling kind.

chocolate brownies – the recipe

Yesterday was a 1970s sort of day. Scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast, football in the garden, a couple of hours at Sunday school and making snails (and lots of other creatures) with Plasticine. Oh, and chocolate brownies.

So for those of you who asked after my Silent Sunday post of yesterday, here’s the rest of the photos – and the recipe for chocolate brownies (in family-of-six quantities):

(Any recipe that starts with a whole crushed bar of 85% cocoa solids chocolate is good in my eyes.)

I started off with a Nigella recipe a while back, but I’m not very good at sticking to recipes, so this owes something to the domestic goddess, but is a variation on her theme.

You need:
225g unsalted butter
450g light muscovado sugar
100g cocoa powder
1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
6 eggs, beaten
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
225g of chocolate – I use a bar, and then I also add a couple of generous handfuls of chocolate chips. Not measured, not exact. Sometimes instead I add a bar of white chocolate. Beat the chocolate with a rolling pin (very therapeutic, that bit)
200g chopped walnuts. Or not.

You need a brownie tin lined with tin foil – this quantity fills mine, which is a deep 32cm x 20cm.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees, or 170 if you have a fan oven. Or gas mark 5.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder and bicarb into a large bowl.
Melt the butter, pour in the sugar and stir it until it’s blended, then pour it all onto the dry ingredients.
Stir it up, add the beaten egg and vanilla, mix again – you want a smoothish mixture.
Plonk in the chocolate (trying to avoid small chocolate-stealers) and chopped nuts, if you’re adding them.

Mix a bit (with obligatory test of mixture – yum)
Splodge it into the tin, spreading it out to cover the base.

Put in oven for 25-ish minutes, no more. Check after 20. Meanwhile, lick the bowl.

After 20 minutes, check the brownies. They should be set on top but wobbly to the touch. They might need another five minutes. It’s a bit of an inexact science – overcook them and they won’t be all gooey on the inside, but they’ll still be lovely – just a bit more cakey.

Let them cool for ten minutes, then cut them into squares.

Makes 32. Or 16. Or 8, if you’re a giant who likes chocolate brownies.

PS – My friend Karin over at Cafe Bebe is just embarking on a gluten free lifestyle and she’ll be baking GF brownies later this week. Pop over for a visit!

how to ice cupcakes – a very bad vlog

(Or: how to ice cupcakes and make yourself look like a blithering idiot, by Rachael Moore aged 37 and a half)

So, a while ago, my friend Kate of the Five Fs blog stated that she couldn’t pipe swirls on cupcakes to save her life.

This has been worrying me enormously. Imagine my guilt if there was a terrible incident whereby Kate was held hostage, with cupcake icing a condition of release.

So here, for your delectation (and with quite a lot of mad Scottish rambling) I present:

How to Ice Life-saving Swirls on Cupcakes – A Film in Two Parts.
(clumsy title, but all bets have been off since there was a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats)

I don’t think Nigella has anything to worry about, do you?
(Sorry Kate, I couldn’t remember if it was you or someone else who asked when I was videoing it!)

Blog – vlog – vlogblog. (Too much icing)

And the finished products, complete with the little birthday boy himself, and a special guest role by my mum:

Terrible cackling.

The End.

jam and jerusalem

Look at my gorgeous, new look Tales from the Village! The blog has been beautified by Liz at Violet Posy Design who is psychic, I think. And a bit of a kindred spirit, too. If you haven’t visited her blog Violet Posy you must. She loves all the stuff I do, and she’s a Doctor Who geek too.

Meanwhile, back to life in the village. I have to confess that although I haven’t yet joined The WI (or Women’s Institute, as it used to be known) I suspect it won’t be long. You know you’re being lured in when the reports in the village newspaper of what they’re up to sound quite tempting. And Jerusalem is one of my favourite hymns, so I would love that bit. (Do they still sing it? My singing is so spectacularly bad that it’d probably be best for everyone if they gave it a miss.)

Anyway, I digress. This week’s theme at Tara’s Gallery is Food.

So here I am again, harping on about getting out into the countryside and picking it. It’s there, it’s free, nobody minds if you pick it as long as you stick to The Countryside Code. The blackberry jam I’ve made from these berries is a million times nicer than anything you could buy in the supermarket, and with no pesticides and a million times more vitamins. (disclaimer: I have no idea if that’s true, but I sort of think it ought to be)

I may even enter the WI Real Jam Festival. It’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? Oh dear.