Author: Jenni

Categories
General

Weekend Baking- the best lemon bar things ever

EVER. Seriously. The husband and I had people round for dinner and I made a batch of 12 lemon bars; we each sampled one before the guests arrived, of course, but the other 10 we ate between the four of us quite quickly! They were just too nice, if I do say so myself; I had my proud face on all evening.

Here’s the recipe- lots of steps but simple enough and so worth it.

Pastry base:

  • 140g/5oz plain flour
  • 60g/2oz granulated sugar
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 115g/4oz cold unsalted butter

Filling:

  • 1 lemon, unwaxed and scrubbed
  • 2 large eggs, room temperature
  • 200g/7oz granulated sugar
  • 2 tbsp plain flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder

Before you begin, grease and line a roughly 8-inch square baking pan (mine was rectangular and about 7″ x 10″!) and stick the oven on to preheat at 180 C.

First up, the pastry base. Start by stiring together the flour, sugar and salt with a whisk until evenly blended. Cut the butter into cubes and combine with the dry ingredients. I did this by hand; one of the benefits of having constantly cold hands is that I have the power to make great pastry 🙂 The consistency you’re after is mostly coarse crumbs, but still a bit chunky. Basically, I would make sure there are no huge lumps of butter and then not worry about it too much. Press this mixture evenly into your prepared baking pan.

This goes in the oven for 15-20 mins until lightly golden, giving you the perfect amount of time to prepare your filling.

Zest and juice the lemon. You’ll need 1 tsp of the zest (or more, if you like it zesty) and 2 tbsp of juice. Put these in a big bowl and add the eggs and sugar. Beat these together until well mixed (I recommend an electric whisk, if you have one) then speed things up for about 1-2 mins, until themixture is pale and foamy. Combine the flour and baking powder and then whisk into the lemon mixture.

By now your base should be ready. Pour the topping evenly over the crust and pop it back in the oven for 25-30 mins, until lightly golden on top.

Once you’ve taken it out of the oven, DO NOT get over excited and try to take it out of the pan to cool. Leave it in there. After it’s nice and cool you can turn it out, cut it up and enjoy!

 The recipe suggests dusting with icing sugar, however, while it looked pretty and tasted nice, it tended to just fall off when you picked them up; which is a shame as I spent ages dusting little stars!

Categories
General

It was the cover that caught my eye… #3

Beautiful as book covers are, when they’re all lined up on the shelf you can’t see them. That’s why this book cover post is decicated to one of my favourite book spines.

The little ship on this edition of King Solomon’s Mines makes me smile every time I see it on my bookshelf.

Categories
Craft

Knitted things- now on Folsky!

Yes, I finally have something listed on Folksy- whoop woo! Check out these ever-so-cute knitted arm warmers.

Categories
Art Inspiration Origami

Weekly Inspiration- Paper, paper and more paper

Categories
Lunchtime Lusting

Lunchtime Lusting- Williams-Sonoma cookie cutters

I know, I know; I’ve done one of these posts about cookie cutters already; it would seem I’m always lusting after them. But, oh, Williams-Sonoma, yours are too wonderful not to bring to people’s attention.

The Star Wars Heroes & Villains set I have already. They are AWESOME, if a little pesky to ice.  But I just discovered yet more excitement.

Star Wars Vehicles!

Marvel Heroes!

SPIDER MAN COMIC BOOK!!

In two months time team Craft Fantastic will be heading to Florida, where there is an actual Williams-Sonoma shop, and we CANNOT WAIT.

Categories
General

Weekend Baking- Cornflour ribbon cake

This is something I found in my grandma’s recipe notebook and thought it sounded interesting. The notebook is a little scrappy one, with no cover (shock horror! If Grandma Wheeler were still alive, she would have recieved a fancy new notebook for Christmas) and the contents are often equally scrappy, meaning there’s often a small amount of guess work. Here’s the recipe as it stood, word for word:

Beat 4oz marg and 5oz caster sugar together. Add 2 eggs and beat until smooth.

Sift 4oz S.R. flour and 4 oz cornflour tog. and add to ingredients with 1 tbsp milk.

Divide mixture into sections and to each add a diff. food colour, or cocoa to one mix. 

Grease a 7″ baking tin and drop a little of each coloured mixture into the tin, till all mixture used up.

Bake at mark 4 for 3/4 to 1 hour.

Now, this seems quite straightforward, but if you are going to attempt this, here are some handy tips…

DOs: Use butter instead of marg if you wish, it’ll be fine. Really make sure the flour is mixed in well; there’s a lot of it! Thus, when it says ‘drop a little of each mixture’ what it should really say is ‘thwack it off the spoon’. Seriously, with all that flour it’s never going to be dropping consistancy. I made a MESS doing this.

DON’Ts: Be careful what kind of tin you use. I used a round one, which was fine, but it meant that the mixture went in lumps side by side; I think it would be much easier to use a loaf style tin, and try to layer the mixture. If you do dollop, (which does provide a nice effect still) when you’ve dolloped the mixture into your tin, don’t just leave it; I was in a rush and made the mistake of leaving mine in dollops, and ended up with a… textured surface… I think perhaps trying to level it would have been a good idea.

However, once it was cut up it did look rather pleasing.

Due to the cornflour, the taste and texture was a bit different to regular sponge cake; however, not at all stodgy or heavy, which was my worry. It was in fact rather tasty.

Categories
General

It was the cover that caught my eye… #2

There’s not much I can say about the cover of this edition of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I think it’s clear why I love it:

The spine is equally exquisite:

The fact that this book is clearly old and worn just makes it all the better for me. A well-loved book is a happy book. Just don’t bend the spine back or I’ll slap you on the wrist.

Categories
Craft Notebooks Stationery

Italian paper sketch pads

I’ve recently completed a job lot of ten A5 sketch pads, all covered in the absolutely beautiful paper I bought in Florence. They look rather nice together, so I thought I’d share:

         

Categories
Craft

Newly Knitted- little glove things

After having knitted a pair of boot cuffs as a Christmas present, it was requested that I also knit a pair of arm warmers, to match. I didn’t actually have much of the same wool left, so I knitted little glove things instead.

Here’s the pattern I use:

  • Cast on 40 stitches
  • Knit one row
  • Then start ribbing pattern; knit 3, purl 1
  • Do the opposite on the next row, i.e. knit 1, purl 3.
  • Keep this up until it’s the desired length, then cast off.

Then all you have to do is sew them up. I sewed about half and inch up from the top, left room for the thumb, then carried on sewing to the bottom. The buttons I added to match in with the boot cuffs:

Categories
Craft Inspiration

Weekly Inspiration- Steampunk & lace

You know sometimes you have what you think is a brilliant idea, so you look on t’internet for a bit of inspiration and find that it’s already out there?

What started it all off was something my mum was telling me about; she’d seen somewhere about making little bowls out of lace doilies (you can find a good tutorial here.) The idea is, basically, that you use an existing glass dish, cover in clingfilm, place your doily on and smother in PVA glue; so when it dries, you’ll have a cute little solid lacey bowl.

Now, I’ve been looking to do some Steampunk-inspired stuff, and have amassed a collection of various bits and pieces of old broken jewellery and watches etc. The only problem is, I’ve been at a loss where to start; I feel I need a single, solid piece to work from, as a base.

As is the way of brainwaves, I don’t know where this came from, but I had a thought: what if I took the whole lace & PVA idea, and made little solid lace shapes as a basis for my Steampunk experiments? Surely lace and cogs go? Of course they do! Check out these marvellous creations from those talented people selling on etsy:  

Pretty little bow from tarnisheddanglies.

Amazingly gorgeous wrist cuffs from raven666.

Or how about this adorable brooch from LadyCharis?

I currently have some lace all glued up at home… can’t wait to try some ideas out!