November

A short month, but long enough for me to get quite overdrawn, due to Christmas shopping and car tax/service/insurance.
Started going to swim training sessions with Oxford tri
Discovered that I like nutella even more than peanut butter.
Discovered that I can eat a whole jar of nutella in one go after a swim session.
Decided on my next swim challenge.
Made pecan pie.
LOVED the ballet Sylvia
Learning to play the piano again
Made the first batch of Christmas shortbread
Survived the chaos at work when the students occupied one of the buildings...
Enjoyed listening to the Advent Carol Service from St. John's Cambridge on Radio 3, so much so that I listened to it all over again the next day.
Lit my advent candle.

In December I'm looking forward to:
A swim coaching session and having my front crawl videoed!
My advent tea party
Going to see The snowman for the third time and the Christmas lights
(as well as some bookshopping)
Taking K's nieces to the ballet again
Some time off work doing nothing

The start of the Christmas baking

My friend's husband visited at the weekend, and, as it was the first weekend of Advent, it provided me with an excuse to bake the first batch of Christmas shortbread of 2010. As you can see, I made stars, snowmen and Christmas trees on this occasion (I have quite an extensive collection of Christmas cutters). I asked my friend what sort of cake her husband likes to eat, and the answer was either lemon drizzle or anything coffee flavoured, so I whipped up a batch of coffee and walnut cakes to go on the cakestand.

More extensive Christmas baking will follow, after I hold my advent teaparty next weekend...

Teach us to sit still (Parks)

I apologise for the lack of book-related posts recently; I feel a lot more motivated in the craft-cooking direction at the moment, particularly as Christmas approaches and I am keen to share the things that I am making (or perhaps that should be show off!!, although I do get ideas from seeing other people's blogs and hope that I also provide some inspiration). I've also taken up serious Swim Training, going along to two fitness swims with the Oxford Triathlon Club a week at the moment, which does eat into my free time and makes me extra tired (and extra extra hungry) - I'm hoping to do a couple of Big Swims next year (even bigger than last year's swim) to raise money for Macmillan and Mind in memory of two people important to K and myself who won't be around to celebrate our wedding with us next year (and also because K has got a place to do L'etape (a stage of the Tour De France open to amateurs) in July and I'll feel a bit left out if I don't have my own event to train for! I'm also trying to complete an assignment for the management course that I've been doing this term (performance objectives anyone?!). Amid all this excitement, not to mention the excitement of the occupation of one of the reading rooms that I supervise at work by fee-protesting students, my stomach flared up badly this week (I think partly due to the large amount of food that I had to consume post-swimming on Monday) and I spent an evening confined to the sofa watching TV.



One book I have read in the last few days that has really resonated with me is Teach us to sit still by Tim Parks. Unlike the rest of his books which are novels, this is an account of his attempt to come to terms with chronic illness. He suffered from a complex set of pains in the groin/prostate area which the doctors were unable to attribute to any cause and thus give him any meaningful diagnosis and treatment. The tests show that there is nothing wrong with him, which is good, but it means that he has to go home and live with the condition. I empathised so much - I have had so many tests done on my stomach, and I am apparently healthy, yet I still have to live with episodes of excruciating pain that don't seem connected to anything at all. So much of it sounded familiar - the exasperation of family members, the days when he could barely walk, the trying to get on with work and life... The last third of the book provides some optimism as Parks takes up meditation and finds some relief from his pain - it isn't something he finds natural but it does help. Something perhaps that I need to learn to do. I realise, writing this, after the first paragraph, that I do have a tendency to fill my days, to try to achieve - even when I am trying to take it easy, I am found on the sofa reading books and wondering whether to blog about them, texting/emailing my friends, or doing cross stitches.

Food for thought definitely, and a book to be recommended to anyone who has chronic pain which cannot be relieved, if just for the hopeful thought that even when things seem hopeless, there may be a possibility out there which is beyond the scope of the medical establishment. Perhaps I need someone to teach me to be still.

Christmas cards 2 (preparing for Christmas 5)

I've made a number of Christmas tree cross stitch Christmas cards - this design is surprisingly simple and can be completed in a couple of hours, and I managed to do 6 of them! The design came from a little kit that I bought at Hobbycraft, but then I used some of my own cottons to make some more, and then bought cards at Hobbycraft to present them in. The bear card also came from a kit but was a little bit more time consuming, so I only did one of those. I hope that people will appreciate the effort put into a cross stitch Christmas card, although the other ones that I have made have been much more labour intensive! More on those next week...

In which pictures of cake are sadly absent

As the title suggests, no pretty pictures of cake this week. I apologise. I've had a couple of bakings to post about but no accompanying pictures for a variety of reasons (greed, disaster, and not-yet-finished).

Greed: The ginger cake that I made sadly disappeared before I got any pictures. This was partly because it had to be left for a couple of days to "mature" before eating (how hard is that?!), and I somehow forgot that it had not been photographed. The recipe came from the Camper Van Cookbook and was pronounced extremely good; perhaps because there was far more sugar and treacle in the recipe than anything else!

Disaster: I really wish I'd taken some pictures of Saturday's disaster which had me in tears and doubting my baking abilities. I decided to make the toffee apple cake that Cornflower blogged to accompany the reading of Elizabeth Taylor's A game of hide and seek as it sounded lovely. I decided to make a round version, rather than a loaf version, but made a bad decision in choice of tin and put it in one that was far too small. The cake overflowed, somewhat akin to a volcano, but fortunately onto a baking tray in the bottom of the oven rather than onto the oven itself. Cake mixture adhered all round the side of the tin and the cake had to be cut out. The resultant mess was apparently exceptionally tasty, and K even ate the overflowings with his coffee, but it was a mess and I was too embarassed to photograph it (but I do wish I'd got a picture of it in the oven to send to Cake Wrecks).

Not-yet-finished: Our Christmas cake is currently wrapped in foil; it's a vegan recipe from Fiona Cairn's book Bake and Decorate which I have de-glutenised, substituting a mix of ground almonds, rice flour and buckwheat flour for the wheat. It needs to be left to mature, and then to decorate, at which point I'll share some pictures. I'm not sure we're big enough fans of Christmas cake to manage to eat a WHOLE one but I did want to practice sugarpasting, and we're planning to make some model penguins to go on top.

This week marks the start of seasonal baking as we have a friend coming round for tea and cake on Saturday, acting as santa between me and a friend who is too poorly to travel - if I can't see her, it's the next best thing to see her husband, and as a thank you I shall ply him with the first batch of shortbread of the season, assuming I can find my Christmas cutters. The following week is my annual Advent Tea Party so I shall be making some goodies for that, and K is wondering about making a gingerbread house again. Watch this space!

The gowk storm

The gowk storm was another of the Canongate Classics that I was sent to have a look at (to recap - Canongate have made available quite a lot of their backlisted classics list through a new print on demand/ebook service). The title intrigued me; what was a gowk storm? It turns out to be an old name for an unseasonal snowfall in early Spring or a storm that brings trouble to people - as I read the book I saw that that title was apt.

This 1930s book tells the story of three sisters, Lisbet, who narrates the book, and her older sisters Julia and Emmy. The three live in a Scottish manse and tells the story of the girls and their relationships. Both of the older two fall in love with unsuitable men; Emmy falls in love with her best friend's fiance, Julia with a Roman Catholic. I was interested in the way that these women's lives were constrained by the restrictions placed on them by the society in which they lived; while we today have freedom almost to pursue relationships with who we like, this is a relatively recent ideal.

Both tragic and romantic, but beautifully told, I was gripped from start to finish, and agree that it deserves its place as among the canon of Scottish literary classics. As I've said before, very glad that Canongate are getting books which might pass the mainstream by out there.

Christmas cards 1 (preparing for Christmas 4)

This year, partly for reasons of economy, and partly because I've really got into doing crafty things over the last six months, I decided to make my own Christmas cards. Earlier in the year, I decided to do some cross stitch cards for "special" cards, for close family members - if I had started in January, I might have had time to do cross stitch cards for everyone I know, but with over 60 cards to send, I think I would have got a little frustrated stitching the same Christmas tree over and over again. I have done a number of cross stitch cards of different designs, which will feature in posts over the coming Thursdays (I think there may be 4 Christmas card posts if that is not too tedious!), but today I want to show off the bulk of my cards, which I even got K to help making! It was very simple idea, and very cheap, although I did end up with a bright green thumb and index finger. I bought 50 blank cards on ebay, a bottle of green spray paint and found a Christmas tree stencil via google. I combined these three things, having covered the sitting room with newspaper, and here is the result!



Now I just need to start writing them!

Christmas book recommendations

I had such an overwhelming response on my post last week about Christmas books, prompted by the addition of a beautiful copy of Dicken's Christmas books to my library, that I thought it was probably worth highlighting everyone's responses in a separate post; like me, many of you enjoy festive reading so I thought that the recommendations should be shared. Vivienne over at Serendipity has had a similar idea and has put together a more comprehensive list of recommendations so do pop over and check that out.

This isn't by any means a definitive list, but some of people's favourites that were mentioned in the comments on my last post, and at the end I've added a section on baking!

Several people mentioned The man who invented Christmas, which is apparently a very readable biography of Dickens, by Andrew Billen. I'll definitely be getting that from the library, although I am intrigued to see that it has been classified as a children's book.

Another book I'll be getting out of the library is The Virago Book of Christmas which is an anthology of writings about Christmas by over 50 woman, including many famous names. It sounds like it could be something that I might want to dip into on each day of advent.

Other recommendations included some of my favourite Christmas reads - Miss Read's Country Christmas, The Tailor of Gloucester (Beatrix Potter) and A child's Christmas in Wales (Dylan Thomas). Two other children's book favourites are Jo of the Chalet School which has a lovely description of an Austrian Christmas, and Helen Craig's Angelina's Christmas which has glorious illustrations of the dancing mouse.

Some recommendations I had not heard of:
A Christmas memory (Truman Capote)
Mr Ive's Christmas (Oscar Hijuelos)
A redbird Christmas (Fannie Flagg)
Christmas holiday (Somerset Maugham)

but I had already got my eye on some of Sharon Owen's books - gentle chick-lit. I enjoyed an Amanda Brookfield with a Christmas theme last year, although I can't remember the title, and Alison Penton-Harper's Housewife on top was an amusing read last year.

Of course baking is an important part of Christmas; my favourite Christmas baking book is probably the Nigella Christmas book which I was given last year as a leaving present from my job - my mincemeat and Christmas chutney is Nigella this year, and last year I made wonderful orange and cranberry Christmas morning muffins. I had Delia's Happy Christmas out of the library last week, and it was a bit of a disappointment - to be honest, I could tell that the book was never going to do it for me as soon as I saw all of the comprehensive lists and plans at the front. As someone who comes from a very small family (only ever 3 of us for Christmas), who has spent the last two Christmases away, and will probably be spending Christmas with someone else's family, although I did once cook a Christmas dinner, the main bit of cooking that I do over Christmas is yummy baking. Even if I did have to "do" Christmas it would be all about the baking for me. So my other favourite Christmas book which I had from the library earlier this year but had to purchase is Linda Collister's Christmas treats which I'm sure I'll be sharing creations from soon. I believe the Hairy Bikers have a new book this Christmas and I might be interested to see that as they have done some interesting baking bits in the past.



Thanks for all of your suggestions, and I hope that you find this post interesting! I'll be writing nearer the time about the pile of un-Christmassy books that I hope to indulge myself in over the period.

Peanut butter cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery book

Regular readers will know that cupcakes are not something I'm usually interested in baking - give me the simpler, more homely fairy cake anyday. But occasionally a recipe will take my fancy, and given the love for peanut butter that I've developed over the summer (and which has been responsible for giving me my figure back) I quite fancied trying these. I've had Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery book for a while, but this is the first thing I've made from it - the cake is a regular cupcake mixture (using milk as well as butter/milk/sugar) but with dark brown sugar and peanut butter to give it a toffeey, peanutty taste. The frosting is milk chocolate - literally just dairy milk mixed with a little cream and butter. The book suggested decorating with peanut butter chips, but I didn't have any of those, so used some chocolate vermicelli instead.

Unfortunately I have identified that it seem to be either wheat or gluten which is the main culprit evil good for me (and not so much dairy); I had a nibble of these before we had sussed this out and they were seriously YUM so I will have to find a way of de-wheatizing them. Still, K was quite happy to finish them off!

Library loot

K and I had an outing to Thame on Saturday. It was principally to have a nice afternoon out and to go to a cookshop to try to replace my pink silicon baking sheet (NB - while they are oven proof, they are not grill proof)...unfortunately they only had red ones, which I was not willing to buy. We picked up some goodies in Waitrose (gluten free chocolate croissants and almond tarts for me, a bottle of Porter and a jar of Chai Latte powder for him), popped into Oxfam where I picked up an original green VMC edition of Rosamund Lehman's short stories - too lovely to resist even though I'm trying so hard not to spend money, but the highlight of our afternoon out was the visit to the new library, which opened in July.

I didn't take my camera as I wasn't anticipating things being so exciting, but here is a picture from the library website. I always like visiting other libraries, partly because they have different book stock (of which more below), partly because the layout of smaller libraries tends to encourage me to browse more widely, but also because with my librarian's hat on I love to see how things are done, even though I no longer work in the public sector.

The library itself was very new and shiny, but lost points immediately for not having a staff desk visible when entering. We had some books to return (Oxfordshire lets you return books anywhere) and couldn't see where to do it. It then transpired that you could use the self-issue machines to do this; fair enough, but the library needs to make it clearer, because if someone trained in libraries can't figure out what to do, then it's unrealistic to expect other people to. There was lots of curvy shelving, which made it a little difficult to find the sequences of books - I struggled to find the start of the fiction, but there was a coffee machine upstairs and plenty of comfy seating. The most exciting bit was taking the books out - I'd identified the self issue machine by this point, and started scanning my books as I sometimes do at the main library, when the books suddenly started to appear on the screen without me scanning them! Being a librarian-type, I realised that they had RFID tags in the books (or radio frequency identification for the uninitiated...). This means that you just have to scan your card, and then put your books on a special spot on the counter, and the books are automatically added to your record. Clever! Despite having worked in libraries for over a decade (eek!), I had never actually seen this in action before (well, it is a relatively new technology) But again, I couldn't see any signs about this - I think it could have been confusing without my library background!

The most entertaining bit of the trip was K and I fighting over the remaining spaces on our cards. We use our cards interchangeably, or rather, I use his card as well as mine, which means we can take out up to 40 books between us, or rather, I can stack up books at home. I've been on a bit of a chick-lit binge recently:
and with other books that I've taken out, we were only able to choose 8 books to take home with us. K looked so wistfully at me that although I could have taken armfuls home with me, that for once he ended up taking home as many books as me... Mine weren't terribly exciting, but here are his:
So there we go, a successful afternoon out and a chance for me to indulge my library geek.