So I've been trying a few new things of late, stepping away from cooking large amounts of food that I then leave in the fridge and ultimately throw out. In an attempt to achieve pure Nigella-ness (without the impressive weight gain) I took to obsessive baking for a few weeks, which could be considered as somewhat bizarre for someone who can't actually eat cake, but it may have made me marginally more popular in the office. After having been bowled over by my friend Allie's chocolate torte on an evening of homage to Ottolenghi I decided I should pay more attention to this cookbook and try a few things out. Definitely the best recipe I've done so far is for their carrot and walnut cake, which I made for Easter:
The temptation to share the recipe is great but that would be plagiarism and also I highly recommend it as a cookbook, certainly worth buying, you can still get it on
amazon. However, I think the crowning glory of my attempt to fatten up my colleagues has to be the epic birthday cake consisting of 3 layers of beautifully moist chocolate cake with chocolate custard icing - Brooklyn Blackout Cake. If a recipe has over 500g of sugar in it, there is little that can go wrong.
This is a variation on a hummingbird recipe that I found in this
blog.
So having suitably fattened everyone I know I have also been trying to improve some of my other craft skills, the main one being knitting. I know that this automatically makes you think that I'm a granny, that goes without saying; however, knitting is appearing to be pretty cool again (if it ever was before). London now has some real gems of shops where you can get fantastic yarns and chat to lovely helpful people who won't just direct you to make poor quality scarves. Two of my favourites are
Loop in Camden Passage in Islington, and
Sharp Works in Herne Hill.
So having dipped my toe into this world of knitting and reading patterns that I haven't quite understood, I decided to take one of the classes on offer at Loop, the first of which I went to last night. The set up is absolutely lovely here, I arrived just before it started at 6.30pm and went into their pretty basement workroom, where I joined the other 7 participants of the class. I was certainly the youngest but not by much at all and everyone was really friendly. I drank at least 3 cups of tea to muster the courage to knit in front of people who evidently hadn't just tried to vaguely get things to look right, but even the real keen beans didn't seem to judge. Meghan, the teacher, is young, friendly and outgoing, and her enthusiasm was really catching. If you are looking to learn the basics of knitting or improve your skills set to start making more complicated items I would definitely recommend booking in.
To show off some handiwork, here is a hat I made the Scot to keep her warm in this really weird weather we're having:
