Poppy-seed Cake Recipe

Ingredients:

3 eggs

150g butter (chop it into small cubes)

1/2 cup of caster sugar

1/4 cup of milk

300g plain white cake flour

3/4 cup of poppy-seeds

1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda (if you are using self-raising flour, this is not needed)

3 tsps cream of tartar (if you are using self-raising flour, this is not needed)

1 to 2 tsps of icing

Preparation

1. Separate the white of egg from the yolks. Put the white of egg to the fridge (it is easier to whisk when cold)

2. Combine the egg yolks with the sugar and the butter until the butter appears melted and you have a good and fairly runny consistency. (If your butter is too hard, you can add a little bit of warm water to make it melt and mix quicker)

3. Add flour, milk and poppy seeds, cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda. Mix everything thoroughly. Start warming up the oven – set it to 175°C.

4. When the oven is heating up, take the white of egg out of the fridge and in a separate bowl whisk the egg yolks into a firm foam. Pour the foam into the cake mixture and gently fold it into the cake mix. Do it until the whole mixture is well combined and little bubbles appear in it. (At this stage you can also add some flour if you think that you cake is too runny).

5. Butter your cake tin (or fill it up with greaseproof paper), pour in the cake mix and put it to the heated oven for about 55-65 minutes. If you put a knife into your cake and the blade comes clean that means the cake is ready. If your mixture was quite wet or you have used a different cake tin, it might take a bit longer to bake.

6. When the cake cools, you can decorate it with some icing powder. I use my small tea leaf holder for this purpose. It helps me to sprinkle the powder evenly on the cake:)

Share and Enjoy!

A few pieces of life

DIY: Heart Made With Salt Dough

Not being able to buy anything new for brightening and decorating our house made me a little bitter recently. The winter was just terribly grey and miserable and I really would like the house to look fresh and colourful again. I want to bring the life back into it. So instead of waiting for the first spring flowers to come out, I decided to go back to my school years and employ the old and ever-so-easy method of using salt dough for making decorations. The final product might be lacking in sophistication but it does cheer me up and the house looks heartened too. ;)

Ingredients:

1 cup flour

3/4 cup salt (I used a mixture of fine and coarse salt to make the heart look rustic)

1 cup water

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Slowly mix all the ingredients together and knead the dough for around 10-15 minutes. Create shapes of your choice and using a pen make a small hole for hanging the ornaments. Put the ornaments into the oven at around 70°C. The dough may take from an hour to a couple of hours to dry out completely depending on the size and thickness of the ornament. Paint with any available colour. :) I used an old lace to hang the heart up. It looks perfectly fine on our window. :)

It’s no longer only about buying nothing new

February is over and as promised I haven’t bought anything new for myself or my son this year. This challenge is really growing on me and my family and I’m really starting seeing and appreciating its influence. In fact, I came to realise that ‘Nothing New’ is no longer only about buying nothing new… it’s much more than this…

I’ve been following the blog of the original initiator of this idea Sash at Inked in Colour and observing how she’s approaching her challenge. I’m reading her posts and I am often taken aback at how far she takes that challenge… how much she pushes herself to live by her rules. Just recently, for example, she has posted an article about making her own paint. I’ve been painting a lot recently… stroking our kitchen walls layer after layer. Not for a second did I think about making my own paint. It just never occurred to me that I can do it. That there is a way for me to do it on my own.

So thinking about Sash’s post while I was applying the last coat of the paint, I began wondering how many other skills are there that we haven’t developed because we are so used to buying things? How many skills have we forgotten because we shop? Are we not de-skilling ourselves because it’s just so convenient to buy things? The answers to these questions made me look at our different lists (shopping list, wish list, DIY list) and seriously consider if there are things on these lists that I can do by myself or learn to do by myself… and there are of course, quite a few… like making your own yoghurt, juices, jams and breads… and learning to craft home décor and sew.

This year I really would like to make some improvements and alterations to our garden, to make it look nice and neat, improve our herb patch and build a raised bed to grow some vegetables. In the spirit of ‘Nothing New’ I am preserving ‘bits’ of our old kitchen to use them for our garden and I also collected quite a few old-style bricks from our distant neighbours who just a few weeks ago knocked down a wall or two in their house. Last year I would probably have just gone to one of the big chain DIY supermarkets and I would try to find articles for my garden there… this year I am thinking differently… this year I want to be creative with what I have and what I can find and above all I want to do it with my own hands and learn some new skills too. Can’t wait.