House photos

Been meaning to post these for a while. This is how the house looks now all our stuff is in it. Not shown: our bedroom or the cat room/library because those are a bit difficult to photograph well.

The front room, now filled with books and cats of many lands.

We are using the traditional tabletop filing system.

Spare room.

The basement with the MASSIVE TELLY. Doubles as a dance studio.

Alcohol corner :) 

And finally, the hot tub! I added the rug and candleholders, there is also a string of solar-powered fairy lights for night time hot-tubbing.

The salt flats

Last week we went on a 100+ mile impulse drive west out to the salt flats. The ground by the side of the road gradually gets more salty as you drive along, and eventually you start seeing tracks from people who have been racing on them. At the point where we stopped there was a thick layer of salt, rippled like the sea bed, and we were able to watch the sun set over the mountains. The ground on the photos sometimes looks like snow, or, ice, or water. It's not. It's all salt.

Abricotines

These are not badly made macarons (really!). These are abricotines, although since I have made the raspberry jam version I suppose they should be framboisines? Anyway, they are essentially macarons but with cake flour added to the mixture. I am still not sure what makes cake flour different to plain flour, but since that is what the Laduree (cannot find accents on this keyboard, sorry) recipe calls for I made a special trip to Walmart for it. The recipe makes a huge batch of mixture which allowed me to do some experimenting. I found that when using baking paper the bottom of each half would colour too quickly and sometimes burn, even when I used a double layer. Turning the oven temperature down when the tray went in made no difference, so I kept it at 170 degrees. The best results came from using my macaron mat on the mini-macaron side, no burnt bottoms and a nice even, round shape. These are the ones in the photo, the first batch looked nothing like them! Strictly speaking they should be covered in flaked almonds but I left those out so I could see what was going on in the oven.

Thanks to the Veterans Day sales a shiny red standing mixer is on it's way, so get ready for even more baking posts :)

Baking continued

I tried making a cake again using self-raising flour and slightly less baking powder, and it sunk less, as I predicted. SCIENCE. Really I should now make a cake with no extra raising ingredients but I'm a bit bored of victoria sponge now and it's time to think about Christmas baking.

My local grocery store does have a few jars of mincemeat, as well as something that appears to be freeze-dried mincemeat *shudder* but as a point of pride I have been making my own for the past few years and I'd like to continue. Not as easy as it is at home though, mince pies are not an American thing and so the ingredients are not that easy to find. Raisins and candied peel - no problem. I had to go to a second grocery store for currants. I could only find sultanas by going to the Middle Eastern store, but that was a worthwhile trip because I also found halloumi for half what it cost me in the deli the other week. Cooking apples would probably have been OK but I like Nigella's recipe with quinces, which I knew I could find at a particular deli, although maybe the Middle Eastern store had those too. I had to make a trip to the British grocery store to buy black treacle and vegetable suet. Sure, I could buy everything online (and Waitrose branded at that) but I resent paying the shipping costs. The British store also had a guy on the till who appeared to be affecting a British accent, which was slightly hilarious. Of course I didn't laugh - I'm far too polite for that :)

So now I should be all set to make mincemeat and Christmas cake (we acquired cheap brandy at the liquor store yesterday) and maybe a Christmas pudding as well. I don't think Americans in general like any of those so we will have to eat them all ourselves :) perhaps Patrick can force some of them on his colleagues and watch them try and be nice about them.

Attaching a photo of the baking shelf in my cupboard. I mean business!

That didn't last long

Snow!

Looks like it could be hot-tub-monkey time sooner than I thought...

Cake disaster!

I have been looking forward to doing some baking in the new kitchen, especially after following the Bake Off from afar. I made some langue de chat on Friday (the easest recipe I could find in the Laduree book) and learned that "conv bake" and "bake" are very different over settings. Today I decided to test the oven with a victoria sponge, as recommended by Mary Berry, and it has gone very badly as you can see! The cakes have sunk in the middle, which means there was too much raising agent in the mixture. I am pinning the blame on the self raising flour. Americans don't really use SR flour so I guess I was lucky to find it at all, but it seems like the stuff they do have has a higher proportion of raising agent than UK flour. Or maybe it's just this brand. The only way to be sure is to try and make another cake!

Weather

Yesterday was hot enough for T-shirts and bright enough for sunglasses. This morning it is snowing! We live in a funny place.

I am looking forward to proper snow so I can sit in the hot tub and pretend to be a Japanese monkey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txDR1y1drl0&feature=youtube_gdata_player