Posts
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Daring Bakers Novembre Challenge - we're frying!
1 commenti Pubblicato da QueenForOneDay a Saturday, November 28, 2009Incredible, one month has passed since the last challenge. This month the recipe chosen by Lisa Michelle was quite familiar to me - after all, living in Italy has the advantage to getting to eat fresh-made Cannolli as often as one wishes to. It was quite exciting to made them from scratch and results were very satisfying, even though frying in my small kitchen was quite a challenge in itself: I added orange water and orange-scented chocolate to the ricotta-filling and decorated the filled cannolli with candied orange peel. What do you think can i be proud of them? :) Check out what fellow bakers did here!.JPG)
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Yes, it’s that time of the week again. Following Loobylu’s thread here it comes again – what’s hot and what’s not on a Wednesday?
Hot
- Four baby chickens that have successfully survived the 600 + km of us changing home
- The Sharon fruit tree and the pomegranate tree in my new garden that provide me with sweet tasty fruit for my lunchbox
- The wood-burning stove in our living room – never had such a cosy warm winter
- Kimmi dolls – have just discovered these gorgeous Japanese wooden dolls last week. Still cannot decide about to whom of them to give a shelter on my library shelf.
Not
- A Skorpion in the bathtub - these are the disadvantages of living out in the "wild"
- 2 weeks of continuous fog around here
- Commuter trains that are always late
- The last part of “Un medico in famiglia”
What is hot or not at your place this week?
Knitting Projects
Can you believe that this gorgeous scarf is only two hours of work? Made of pompom acrylic wool, it’s so soft and fluffy I’d like to wear it all day long. The colour combination is really nice and is available in many more colours (greens, pinks, turquoises …..) .
By the way, if you like it, you can buy it here!
Inspired by Bakerella’s gorgeous mini cakes on a stick, I finally got around to making some myself for my office-leave in Rome. I adopted the recipe a bit to the things I had on hand, and was quite satisfied with the results. The mini-cakes are tasty and give a full blast of intense chocolate flavour in one perfect bite. They are lovely to look at, too :)
Recipe:
5 cups cake crumbs (I used chocolate)
½ cup fresh cream
Chocolate (I used white)
Smarties
Sprinkles
Food colourings
Skewers
Mix the cake crumbs with the cream to create an even mixture. Refrigerate until workable. Make nut-sized mushroom-shaped bites with a chunky “stem” and a rounded “cap”. Stick on skewers, dip the tops in melted chocolate (coloured to your liking if using white), and decorate to make them look like cupcakes. Store in a cool place.
Knitting Projects
Having lots of time to spend on the train to and from Genoa going to work and back, the options are three – sleeping, reading and knitting. My newest knitting project comes from the Italian magazine “Maglia” that is available at the newspaper stand once a week and comes with about 10 new patterns and a skein of wool. The wool comes in “natural” colours and is intended to create a knitted blanket made of different-patterned squares, not unlike a quilt. The blanket is too much (and a bit too boring) for me, I’d rather use the knitted squares to make pillows (follow the next posts for the evolution of this idea), but the patterns are really beautiful. Unlike most of the knitting stuff available in the magazines, these ones don’t look like from my grandma’s closet. The project I am currently working on is a chunky braided cardigan, knitted all in one piece out of alpaca-merino wool taken as a double thread. The results till now are lovely – thanks to the double thread the work goes on fast, and I am quite intrigued by the fact that it’s all a one-piece.
I will keep posting about the progress. For today I leave you with the result of an hour’s work:
These days have been busy with packing and unpacking stuff, building the new coop for our chickens and doing numerous trips to IKEA – officially to get 4 (FOUR) Billy libraries (follow their fate in one of the next posts), unofficially to get these marvellous ginger-spiced caramels:
