Paleo chocolate cake – success at last!

I have been (more or less) following a paleo diet since November.

Simply speaking, paleo means no grains = no wheat, corn, oats, pasta, rice. So regular cake is not really on the menu!

This is not my first attempt at paleo cake, but it is the most successful so I thought I would share with you.

 

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees and grease and line an 8 inch baking tin.

Melt 100g butter (or you could use coconut oil if you wanted to go dairy free) and stir in 75g dark chocolate until it melts. Leave to cool.

Whisk 4 eggs with 50g honey until they are creamy and well aerated.

Pour the cooled chocolate butter mixture in slowly, while whisking all the time.

Mix 100g ground almonds with 40g coconut flour and a teaspoon baking powder. Fold this dry mix into the wet mix.

Pour batter into cake tin and bake for approximately 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.

Allow to cool, then if you like, drizzle with some more melted dark chocolate.

 

Enjoy! But not too much, this is a treat, even if it is grain free!

 

30 days of creativity – day 3 – menu planner

It’s September, when I always vow to be more organised over the course of the coming school year, so today I modified a cork pin board into a menu planning board.

This was really simple – I cut 7 rectangles of coloured paper (14cm x 6cm) and glued them onto the board. Then I stamped the days of the week onto wooden pegs and I glued those on top of the rectangles.

Then I made a couple of little envelopes to hold a stack of little cards. I stamped our favourite meals onto these, so that each week I can just change the meals on the pegs, and hey presto, everyone knows what’s for dinner. I also left some blank for those meals I haven’t thought of yet.

(No, there’s not a card which reads “Get your own bl**dy dinner.” Not yet.)

 

(30 days of creativity simply means spending 30 minutes doing something creative for thirty days. They don’t have to be consecutive days. Why don’t you join in?)

30 days of creativity – day one – minecraft duvet cover

Armed with a plain green duvet cover (a £2 bargain in Wilkinsons), a pot of black fabric paint I can’t even remember buying and a paintbrush I decided to make my ten year old son a Minecraft duvet cover.

I drew a creeper template, which I placed under the fabric and traced with my prym marker (a quilter’s pen which fades away slowly) then just painted very carefully. I randomly spaced my creepers, rather than measuring their exact location. (A hoard of creepers is the correct collective noun according to my son.)

It’s very hard to take a photo of the finished item without falling off the top bunk or banging your head on the ceiling – so you will have to be satisfied with a rubbish photo!!

(30 days of creativity simply means spending 30 minutes doing something creative for thirty days. They don’t have to be consecutive days. Why don’t you join in?)

Raspberry Custard Cake (best cake ever)

This is delicious.
You have to make it.

Ingredients:
250g butter
200g caster sugar
250g self raising flour
150g tinned custard
4 eggs
1 tin raspberries (drained – save the juice for something else) (or you could use fresh or frozen)
half tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essence

Heat your oven to 180 deg C and grease and line a deep 8 inch cake tin.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then mix in the flour, baking powder, eggs, vanilla and about a third of the custard until you have lovely smooth batter.

Blob about one third of the batter into the cake tin to roughly cover the bottom.
Blob half the raspberries on top.
Cover with the rest of the batter.
Blob the rest of the raspberries and the remaining custard on top.

You now have some yummy looking gloop in your cake tin.
Bake in the centre of the oven for 40 minutes, then cover with foil and bake for 30 – 40 more minutes. Do the skewer test to check it is cooked through.

Remove from the tine and admire the yumminess.

This cake is delicious both hot and cold.

I served mine with some raspberry custard cream – just some double cream, some of the juice from the tin and a blob of cold custard (I had half a tin left) all whisked up.

Go on, make it.

It really is delicious.

You know you want some.

And share it with your friends and family, because everyone deserves raspberry custard cake.

Whoever knew an old keyboard would be so inspiring?

My 8 year old son Anthony wanted to make something out of the circuit board of the old keyboard. He thought it would look cool hanging on the wall like a picture.

We decided to print out and glue on some words to make a door sign.

The circuit board already had handy holes so we chopped some of the curly flex off and threaded it through for a hanging thread.

Purple, purple, purple

I’ve just painted my daughter’s room purple.

Very purple.

It’s like being hugged by a blackcurrant.

Anyway, this post is a little tour of Poppy’s new bedroom. And also a pictorial reminder of how tidy it is.

Look there is carpet!

It will probably never be this tidy again. The twenty zillion soft toys like to scatter themselves everywhere.

I love this bookshelf; I think it reminds me of those halcyon days as a school librarian. (Oh, yes, I was that cool.)

I made the curtains; curtains are my nemesis. Why is making two rectangles so hard? These ones are quite straight and everything. I only swore when I pulled the strings too far and had to re-thread them through the header tape. I bought the fabric for £1 a metre, so these curtains only cost £3 as I had some leftover header tape.

I made this too, ages ago when I first started making stuff to sell.

And I made a Batman cushion because my daughter is a princess hating, trouser wearing, superhero fan.

And I made this too; it’s actually her birthday card but I popped it in a frame so I can admire it forever!

And here are the Sylvanians living on the spray painted table from my last post. I’ve dressed them for this picture as Poppy prefers them naked. Somehow in her 5 year old brain it is ridiculous for a bear to wear a dress, but perfectly fine to live in a cabin with a flowery sofa.

So, that’s it. I’m off to listen to some Prince songs and drink some Ribena.

And to hope Poppy doesn’t announce next week that purple is not her favourite colour anymore, and can she have a pink room please?

 

 

 

Scrapbooky Frames… a new venture

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned that I love to scrapbook, and over the past year I’ve been doing a fair few scrapbook style cards using customer’s photographs. But now I am trying to move into selling framed pieces of scrapbookiness.

This is a little picture I made of my daughter Poppy, unframed on the left and in a red box frame on the right. I think they are so much lovelier than a plain framed photograph.

In a bid to show off some examples I’ve photographed some of the pages I’ve made for myself.

Honeymoon in Mauritius

Paddling in Tenby

Football days

I especially love how vintage photographs look in these frames, so I made this one for my mother-in-law for Mother’s Day; it is her own mum in a beautiful vintage photo which I have adorned with vintage buttons and lace.

Perfectly personal and unique; what do you think?

 

 

Minecraft mad

My sons are obsessed. They think of nothing else except Minecraft.

I’d tell you what was so great about it, but I am 39 years old. I don’t really understand. It’s not really anything like the Manic Miner of my youth.

But I like the creeper image – it’s very simple to reproduce!

 

I have painted this for their Christmas present.

A large canvas, divided into squares; I painted the green ones first using 2 shades of green acrylic, gradually adding white to get lighter shades. I painted them randomly rather than to a plan, then painted the face in black acrylic last.

It’s not fine art, but it was fun, and my boys are going to love it!

A tatty lampshade transformed!

I bought 2 slightly bashed up lamps second hand. They cost me £3 for the pair.

I quite liked the bases so my plan was to just buy some new shades.

Then my crafty side woke up, and whispered “pva” in my ear.

There was a Spongebob magazine discarded on the side…

And hey presto!

One decoupaged Spongebob lampshade – still a bit damp in the picture to be honest. I’m hoping it will dewrinkle a bit when it’s dry.

Here it is, sitting on the bureau next to my Mauritian dodos and a piccy of the kids.

Now, what to stick on the other one…

Eclectic?

My husband and I have been pondering the question, “How many items of mis-matched furniture do you need before your style is eclectic?”

This follows a few happy shopping expeditions in a couple of local charity shops.

First, a bookshelf for the boy’s room, dark wood, not all fashionable. Standing next to their pine bunkbeds.

And some 70’s salt and pepper pots, just because we liked them.

And then some Nathan furniture – a dresser and a telephone seat – an outdated, defunct piece of furniture in the age of the cordless phone!

So, are we eclectic? Probably not yet. I think it’s more than having a bunch of things which don’t match. I think it’s about having a bunch of things which you love and you have chosen. And you don’t care that they don’t match.

It’s about having a home with personality, one where you love to live. We have antlers in our hallway…

(I don’t like those, but my husband does. I suppose an eclectic house can’t just be influenced by one personality!)

And there is also character and personality in the special handmade things.

This is my new mirror made by a friend. (You should really check out his website http://www.ammoniteoak.co.uk/ ) And there are also things I’ve made myself.

Like my patchwork quilt, and my canvasses.

And so, we have decided to be eclectic, to make a conscious effort to fill our home with things we love, regardless of whether they match. To look for interesting thing, old things, new things, handmade things and homemade things. Selecting what we think is the best. To stop wasting money on flat pack rubbish and things that are bland.

We want to have what we love, and love what we have.

(This still means I can shop at Ikea, right?)