A Bizarre Phenomenon

On Sunday my husband and I went walking. It was great to get out in the fresh air and actually use my muscles for a change. Although most of the snow from earlier this year had melted, there were still patches of it lying around. However, partially melted snow is not the bizarre phenomenon I wish to share with you today. This is much more exciting and unusual. Apparently (so my clever husband’s hypothesis goes), once upon a time in the very recent past (like the last month – he didn’t give that detail, but I’m taking advantage of poetic license here!) a large cavity of usually boggy ground filled with water. The top layer of the newly-created pond froze over whilst somehow the water below drained away (probably into the ground – the observant husband pointed out a possible sink hole in the area) and the frozen ice sheet on top cracked gently and then settled into its new position. Which resulted in bizarre sight in the photos below. The first two were taken from a path quite high above the ice. The rest were taken from a little wander down to the ice itself – usually not a good idea because the ground is unstable, but on Sunday it was frozen in place and so very conveniently stable for us (although a little embarrassing when three walkers appeared on the path far above looking curiously down on us – it felt like we were unprepared actors in centre-stage!)

Photo Fun

A few weeks ago I posted some pretty photos of the snow (see the post here: http://somesomeandsome.blogspot.com/2010/01/happy-new-year.html). Now, sadly for me, I don’t own Photoshop so can’t do photoshopy-fancy-dancy things with my photographs before posting them. But I have discovered a great way to make minor amendment to pictures that is part of Windows. One of the tabs in Windows Photo Gallery is labelled ‘Fix’. I’ve circled it with a big red circle in the screenshot to show you were it is.

This ‘fix’ tab provides a list with five options – I’ve circled them in pink in the screenshot. Let’s take a closer look at those options:

I’ve not really got to grips with the Auto Adjust option yet, and have little need for fixing red eyes in the photos I post on this blog. But the other three options are really useful. The Crop Picture option does just what it says on the tin – crops the picture. This can be very handy when you’ve got a counter covered with cake crumbs that can distract attention from the cake you’re trying to showcase in a photo – just crop out the counter (or as much of it as you can without upsetting the aesthetic balance of the picture!). I use the Adjust Exposure option the most – it’s great for brightening up a picture when the lighting conditions when you took the picture were not great (as happens often in my north-facing kitchen). I’ve recently started playing with the Adjust Color option a little more. Go too far and your picture may take on more than just an odd hue, but play it right and you can get some really fun effects. If you decide to play with this great toy though, just remember to save a separate copy of the original photo or click undo all before navigating away from the picture – otherwise it' will save the image in the state it’s in when you close Windows Photo Gallery or move to a different picture within the program.

I thought I’d share the results of some of my playing with you – just little adjustments of the colour and light can result in a huge array of fun. First here’s the original…

And here are some of the pictures that resulted from my playing…

Image 1:

Image 2:

Image 3:

Image 4 (love the sunset effect of this one):

Image 5 (early evening to follow the ‘sunset’):

Image 6 (a little weird perhaps):

Image 7 (sepia tones):

Image 8:

I’m considering printing some, framing them and hanging them together as a set, though I’m not sure which – all suggestions welcome. I think my favourites are images 3, 4 and possibly 8. Which is your favourite?

Raspberry Cake with Vanilla Cream Cheese Icing

I have many exciting recipes planned or executed and waiting to be typed up and posted. Sadly, actually getting round to writing the posts takes much more work (or feels like it) than the creations themselves. Quite often, I have ideas for non-food blog posts, but they’ve gone by the time I actually sit down to write them. This recipe is a fine example of my create-to-write-up problem – I made the cake and took the photos way back in December last year and I’m only posting it now (what a slacker!).

I first made this cake in the summer of 2009 for my brother’s birthday. He had requested a cake with blueberries and on my second try (the first involved a lemon and blueberry disaster) I came up with the recipe below. And it was good. Then my husband suggested using raspberries instead of blueberries so I tried making it again with the substitution. And it was even better. But the best thing about this cake is the icing. The recipe below makes a bit more than is needed, so you can spoon a bit extra on top of each slice or just eat it straight out the bowl (I certainly won’t tell and neither will the numerous members of my family who are guilty of the same…). As always, a cup in the recipe below is a 250 ml one, and measurements involving less than a full cup involve rough guesswork through the glass of the 250 ml cup.

Ingredients for the cake:

5 eggs

2/3 cup margarine

1 2/3 cups white sugar

3 1/2 (three and a half) dessertspoons vanilla essence

3 cups self-raising flour

Pinch salt

3 cups of frozen raspberries (or blueberries or any other berries you have handy)

Ingredients for the icing:

1 400g tub of cream cheese (I think I used full cream)

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla essence

To Make the Cake:

1. Put the oven on gas mark 5 to pre-heat and grease your cake tin (I think the one I used was an 8-inch one).

2. Separate the egg yolks from the whites and then beat the whites until stiff and then put aside the egg whites for later.(Mmmm…doesn’t that make you think of meringues?)

3. In a new bowl, cream the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy. (Please pretend there’s a lovely picture of the creamed margarine and sugar here. Thank you.)

4. Add the vanilla essence and egg yolks to the creamed margarine and sugar mixture, adding a little at a time (about one yolk) and mixing thoroughly before adding the next bit.

5. Sift the flour and salt into the mixture and fold in gently.

6. When the flour is mixed in, fold in the beaten egg whites.

7. Place half the mixture in the greased cake tin, and then sprinkle half the frozen raspberries over the top of the mixture. Use raspberries straight from the freezer – this doesn’t seem to work very well if you let them thaw before using them. Press some of the raspberries down into the mixture very gently – this will help spread the raspberries through the different levels of the cake.

8. Add the other half of the cake mixture to the cake tin and top with the remaining raspberries. Again, push some of the raspberries down into the mixture slightly to spread them through different levels of the cake.

9. Finally, bake the cake in the pre-heated oven until golden-brown and cooked through. This takes about an hour and a quarter. When the cake has cooked, place it in the tin on a cooling rack in the tin for a couple of minutes and then carefully remove from the pan and leave to cool completely. If some of the raspberries are stuck to the bottom of the pan when you try to remove the cake, gently run a spatula, or even a knife, under the cake to loosen it.

To make the icing:

1. Start making the icing right after putting the cake into the oven. To make the icing, put the cream cheese, icing sugar and vanilla essence into a bowl and beat together with an electric beater.

2. When the icing ingredients are fully combined, cover the bowl with clingfilm and put it in the fridge whilst the cake cooks.

3. As the cake cools, remove the icing mixture from the fridge and beat it with an electric mixer until it is stiff and easy to spread. When the cake is cool, ice it with the cream cheese icing and decorate however you wish.

Happy New Year…

…or should I say Happy New Eleven-Twelfths of a New Year! This post is seriously overdue. I’ve had many ideas for posts over January, but sadly haven’t got round to finishing and publishing any blog posts until now (at least one was almost ready to publish but needed some pretty pictures). To try make up for it, here are a few pretty pictures from various times and places, all taken when the snow lay deep on the ground across the UK (its nearly all gone where I am now).

Okay, maybe this one isn’t pretty in the strict sense of the word, but I thought I’d set the mood with some evidence of our daytime temperatures. And now on to the properly pretty pictures…

What winter scene do you wish you’d been able to capture on camera?

Funny Sign Friday (on Friday - YAY!!)

As winter approaches and the days and nights get colder, my mind is turning back to the deliciously hot and very relaxing holiday we had, what now seems very long ago. So, with that thought uppermost, I've dug through the summer snaps to find a Funny Sign for this Friday that takes me back to a happy place - Crete. Now, by way of preamble, I don't believe in being too harsh on foreigners for their funny signs - especially as, in this case, we're dealing with what is, for them, a foreign language and a foreign script. So long as the meaning is clear, I'm happy - I know what "ceramicks" are and whilst I didn't buy any of those, I did buy a lovely bag in a nearby shop. What I am confused about, though is the merchandise offered first in the list on this sign. What are sea kinds? Answers on a postcard please - I'll give you the address as soon as I've saved up enough to return to that wonderful island.

This first picture is to give the sign a bit of architectural context - it was at roof level in a row of shops. And here is the zoomed-in version...

Spinach and Cheese Flan

Before I begin this, I will acknowledge that, yes, I know the in-vogue thing to say these days is quiche, rather than flan. But I grew up calling them flans and somehow that name makes this dish seem more homely. filled with memories (despite never having spinach in a flan as a child) and less abstract than calling it a quiche.

A couple of weeks ago I saw some lovely-looking spinach when I went shopping and bought it, planning to come up with something creative with it at some point. And what I came up with is probably my best vegetarian dish yet (I am not a vegetarian so tend to focus most of my creative energies in the savoury realm on meat-based dishes). Whilst I worked out the recipe the first time, I didn’t take any pictures. So we’re having it again tonight, and this time, I’ve taken some pictures (well, let’s be honest about this, pictures are really the best thing about recipes – well they are in my world!). This is a bit of a ‘somesomeandsome’ recipe – I can’t give you exact quantities for some of the ingredients, but just feel your way and hopefully it will turn out yummy. All the cup measurements below refer to a 250 ml cup/mug. Here’s what you’ll need:

For the pastry:

3 cups self-raising flour

Pinch salt

1/2 cup toasted mixed seeds

3/4 cup margarine or butter

1/2 cup boiling water

For the filling:

5 eggs

Pepper

1/4 cup cream

1/4 cup milk

c. 200g spinach

Hard cheese (I find mature/strong cheddar worked well)

What to do:

1. Sift the three cups of flour into a bowl with a pinch of salt.2. Whizz the half a cup of seeds in a food processor until they are fine crumbs, then add the seeds to the flour. 3. Melt the three-quarter cup of margarine/butter and add to the flour/seed mixture, with half a cup of boiling water and mix until combined. 4. Roll out dough and line flan pan (I think this one was about 10 inches in diameter).Hmmm…I really should have tidied up around the pan before taking this picture…

5. Prick dough all over with a fork and bake for about 10 minutes on gas mark 5 or 6 (you’re aiming to get it just about to turn golden-brown – don’t cook it completely, otherwise it’ll burn later). Tonight obviously does not represent my finest photo-taking moments – look at that hand so beautifully in focus when the pastry should have been the star of this image.

6. Whilst the dough bakes wash the spinach and pop it into the microwave in a covered bowl for one minute on high power.

7. Whilst the dough bakes whisk together 5 eggs, a sprinkling of black pepper and one quarter cup of cream mixed with a quarter cup of milk.

This photo is a great example of the ‘some, some and some’ approach to cooking/baking. That is supposed to be a quarter cup of cream with a quarter cup of milk, which should equal one half, not the just-under five-eighths that I see here. I take the view that so long as you keep the differences minimal, it should still be good – or at least edible. I’ll devote another post to the philosophy of some, some and some one day… For now just keep adding all those lovely ingredients.

8. When the pastry has just begun to turn golden-brown remove it from the oven, but don’t turn the oven off.

*Pretend there is a picture of the beautifully cooked pastry here – I appear to have forgotten to take the shot.

9. Take a handful of spinach and squeeze it gently to get rid of some of the moisture.10. Spread the spinach over the pastry base and repeat the squeezing and spreading process until all the spinach is on the base. 11. Grate some cheese over the spinach - aim to cover the whole area. To be honest, I have no idea how much cheese there is here - it’s probably more than my heart would like, but seems like a very good amount to my tastebuds. 12. Finally pour the egg and cream mixture over the cheese and spinach.

13. Bake at gas mark 5/6 until golden-brown and cooked.14. The last thing left to do, apart from turn off the oven, is to eat this yummy concoction, perhaps with some salad…