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These are just out of the oven, still hot and I can’t wait to get some Devonshire clotted cream onto them when they’re a little cooler and some homemade jam. We’ve just spent a week in Devon and I only ate ONE cream tea – I’m gutted, it just wasn’t enough.
Today I have made my first attempt at vegan cupcakes, or fairy buns as I want to call them. Fairy buns because I have made them mini, although they look deceptively larger in the photos – they are in fact made in petit four cases.
I have a good friend whose little girl turns 5 next week, and tomorrow she goes to a wonderful school in a small wood, set up by her mom. Sadly my friend is really unwell at the moment and asked if I could make cupcakes for her to take to school with her.
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the National Trust’s Fine Farm Produce Awards in London. Before the evening event I spent the afternoon wandering around Borough Market – a place I’ve heard lots about, always wanted to go, but have never been.
Here’s what I found…
Loving the window full of pickled onions
I could have bought so much cheese home but I would have been unpopular on the train home!
Beautiful breads but with London prices
Following yesterday’s post on processing large amounts of pumpkin puree, we put the first lot to use in a Pumpkin Cinnamon Spice Bread. I followed a recipe from Sunny Side Up in San Diego for Pull-Apart Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Bread.
Originally the recipe came from this Pumpkin Spice Pull-Apart Bread with Butter Rum Glaze created by Willow Bird Baking – a brilliant blog full of delicious sounding recipes.
It is such a delicious, soft bread that I will definitely be making it again – I would like to try it with less sugar and more pumpkin though. It involves making a bread dough that has the pumpkin puree in, then rolling this out, brushing it with butter and covering in a sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg mix.
You get to then press it in with your fingers…
Sunday was spent mostly dealing with this beast…
This is a Zucca de Marmellata grown on our allotment, seeds bought from Sarah Raven. After doing a bit of research it seems to be an Italian variety often known as a jam pumpkin – funnily enough for making pumpkin jam.
In total this pumpkin weighed over 20kg – can’t quite believe it! As you might be able to see from the top picture it had started to go mouldy in the centre, so we will have to ‘process’ the other pumpkin we have of this size soon.
This time last week I was enjoying a morning of venison cookery in the stunning old kitchen at Dunham Massey National Trust. As a volunteer and editor of an internal National Trust newsletter on food I went along to find out what it was all about.
What a wonderful morning. In my opinion there were several things that set this cookery demonstration apart from others:
Firstly, the setting. The event was held in the original old kitchen at Dunham Massey, a room that you would normally wander through on your tour of the house. It is an impressive room, bright with high ceilings, a massive Aga, a beautiful collection of copper pans, and a hefty big wooden workbench.
Secondly, the venison. The meat used in the cookery demonstration came from the deer park – perhaps if you a regular walker at Dunham Massey you might have even passed that same deer that we got to sample.
Has anyone come across this before – a roasted and salted corn snack? They look like popping corn, before its popped, but don’t break your teeth.
They are brittle and salty and pretty tasty – I’ve never heard or seen of them before but came across them in a deli in the Cotswolds.
It has been long over due sharing details of this wonderful farm shop – perhaps a big statement to make, but I think St Kew Harvest Farm Shop could be my all time favourite farm shop.
On our last morning in Cornwall we decided to head to the farm shop to stock up on lovely items before we headed north to home. When we arrived the shop was full of the fragrance of warm cakes straight from the oven.
Sat at a little table looking out to the fields beyond, we ate lemon drizzle cake for breakfast and I had a divine cup of hot chocolate.
Whilst everyone else has been enjoying the sun this weekend, we (mainly Mr Rigg) have been stuck inside preparing our living room for an electrician and plasterer this week.
These are photos of what the living room looked like after we’d taken everything out of it and covered all the furniture. It’s looking terrible.
Mr Rigg spent one evening stripping the terrible wallpaper off the staircase wall, and you can see that we’ve spent the last (quite possibly) 2 years living with bare brickwork, exposed concrete floor along the edge of the room, an unpainted chimney breast, and lots of peeling paint.
I’ve got some photos to share from my trip to London (Borough Market and the National Trust Fine Farm Produce Awards) but whilst I sort them all out I thought you might like to see these incredible English muffins.
They were hefty things that were drawing a crowd on their stall at Borough Market, and well I couldn’t resist either. I had them for breakfast this morning, pulled apart with my fingers (no bread knife involved) and toasted them.
Then when my thick slabs of salty butter didn’t melt, I bunged them under a hot grill until the butter went all golden. Topped with some homemade strawberry jam.
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