I made a batch of absolutely gorgeous pumpkin muffins this morning. Light, fluffy, tender, just the right amount of sweetness.

The dog ate half of them.

#ragemachinemurderbot

Baloo’s Favourite Pumpkin Muffins:
1 (15 ounce) can pumpkin puree
4 eggs
1 cup melted butter
2/3 cup water
2 cups white sugar
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking ( Read more... )

Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy.

I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it ( Read more... )

I have, in a really stunning run, made two bad batches of fudge in a row and followed it up with pie crust worse than what I made at Thanksgiving, which was, up until then, easily the worst I’d ever made. But that’s okay, because the pie I then made was too sweet, too!

Srsly. *dies in a pit*

I’ve now gotten all the necessary ingredients to make ( Read more... )

We discovered we have a crabapple tree in the front garden. Chaos immediately ensued, resulting in this:


( Read more... )

I got quite a few words this week, actually. Twelve or so thousand, which is a whole lot more than I’ve done in a long time. I even had a 5K day yesterday, which lent some faint hope that I’m actually getting back into the habit, swing of things, and stride. I reached 30K on REDEEMER, which is probably the 25% mark (it could be the 1/3rd mark, but ( Read more... )

There’s been an unexpected benefit to having gone out and chopped my way through the nettles and brambles in search of blackberries, which is that I tromped quite a path out there and unintentionally exposed the plants to quite a lot more sunlight than they’d been getting. That, combined with a couple of weeks of unseasonably sunny, warm weather ( ( Read more... )

I’ve been going out and getting nettle-stung in search of the wild blackberries that are growing in our garden. (Nettles offend me mightily. Plants do not try to kill you in the land of my people, at least, nothing but Devil’s Club, and Devil’s Club looks like it wants to kill you from forty feet away.) Anyway, I’m apparently too easily taunted by ( Read more... )

Iiiiiii have made an aaaaaaamaaaaaaazing batch of strawberry rhubarb jam.

Ted, who likes zingy strawberry/rhubarb jam, thought there wasn’t enough rhubarb in mine generally, so I did half and half instead of favouring the strawberries, and it’s rrrrrrrrrrrrrreeaaaaaaaaaallllly good.

I used jam sugar because I didn’t have enough regular sugar, and I ( Read more... )

I was in town yesterday and saw a fruit vendor with 1-kilo flats of strawberries for €5 each, which I thought was an excellent deal. I bought two, came home with them, and went back out not much later to get (other things also, but) four more.

The young lady at the booth looked at me a bit askance when I came up and asked for four flats. I ( Read more... )

Judging from the series of pathetic sounds I was making earlier, I have Man Flu. :) (I feel that if my husband moaning and moping around like I was doing means he’s got the Man Flu, it’s only fair that I should too.) Anyway, it’s sick in this house. Poor Ted is actually the only one who isn’t sick, and he was driven out of our bedroom last night by ( Read more... )