Hearts and Thermomix Strawberry Muffins Recipe

Valentines' Day.  A day for romance.  One day out of the whole year?? Nah!  Since moving into the Country House with Himself I've been making "moments".  Dimming lights, lighting candles and popping the scented oil burner in the kitchen window. It's just an excuse to make sure we spend time together which was the whole point of me moving in.  So I make small packages of time - away from work, away from all the decorating projects we still have to do and away from checking weather updates (me) and football results (him) on our phones.  

My Valentines Day gift to Himself was a zentangle inspired little drawing which I put in a frame...I'll show you later.

The bread practice continued with the lovely James' Morton's no knead whole meal loaf.  Usually I shape and plop on a baking sheet and put in the oven.  This is pure laziness and means I don't have to wash up a tin afterwards but this time I decided I'd ask Himself to wash up so it went in a tin :)

And ta dah!  

While the bread was cooling down we went for a run in actual sunshine.  This is the first we've seen of blue sky for several days.  I had time during my warm up walk to take this pic heading out of the village past the tiny, tiny toll house on the left.  Himself says in Olden Days there would have been gated access at this toll house to the main street with various charges depending on whether you were driving a herd of geese or riding a donkey.  

So, I had some strawberries and the now compulsory cupboard ingredient for muffins - white choc chips.  I also had a very reliable Thermomix recipe for muffins which brilliantly gives the basic recipe and at the end says just add 150gms of whatever flavoured ingredients you want.  This is my kind of recipe because although I mess around with savoury recipes all the time, I never do with baking recipes.  Time to change that....

How gorgeous do those colours look !

And the end result...well there are supposed to be 12 but I had to check a couple before taking the photo so I knew I could tell you they were ok.  And yes, they are very ok!

The recipe is below and was adapted by Pam Sihota from Australia who converted it for the Thermomix. (There's no reason you couldn't mix everything by hand I'm just lazy and trying to get more use out of my Thermomix

Ingredients

for 12 muffins

- 220 g Self-Raising Flour

- 90 g Vegetable Oil

- 130 g Buttermilk or Plain Milk

- 170 g Caster Sugar

- 1 Egg, lightly beaten

- 1 Tsp Vanilla Extract

- 150 g added Flavours, e.g. raspberry & white choc chip, banana, grated apple

How to prepare Thermomix Muffins

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Prepare muffin tins (lightly butter/oil or place muffin cases).

Placed all ingredients into TM bowl. Mix for 20 Sec. on Speed 4.

Add flavourings. Mix in Reverse. 20-30 Sec. Speed 1.

Place in tins and bake for 15-20 Min. or until lightly browned.

Finally, I think the gift went down well because it's been placed on the mantelpiece.

Still raining...

The rain continues to fall and although the Country House is (mostly) watertight the journey to work along flooded country lanes gets more interesting each day.  Will I get through the Big Dip...  will I make it past the Plain of Puddles?
And the wet weather keeps us all indoors, so this week I've continued to focus on Zentangling with the aid of a very good book.  One Zentangle A Day teaches you three designs each day which you then have to use in a tile.  As you work through the book it introduces you to using shadow, shading and other things to add depth to your patterns and make them pop.  

I had my doubts about needing a book to teach me how to "doodle" but there is more to it than I thought and I can see an improvement in what I'm producing now.  It's flowing more easily.

So all that had helped with a birthday present for someone.  I won't say anymore in case they read this before I see them tomorrow !!  It's caused artistic differences between me and Himself because he doesn't think much of it and that made me doubt it.  But a straw poll at work (ie asking one other person!) restored my faith and so it's framed and ready to be given.  I just have to hope Himself is wrong!

For a change I thought I'd try drawing on a stone too...

 Since this was just a practice I drew straight onto the stone...it was very gritty and wore out my pen nib :(

So I'm getting two stones ready for next week by coating them first in some gesso I found in the back of a drawer....as you do.

There was a lot of baking done this Sunday too, the Little One made some cakes form a school recipe. They were such a success I didn't get a chance to photograph them!  And I had another try at one of James Morton's loaves from his book Brilliant Bread.  For this loaf I left it to prove overnight in the fridge.  Next morning we had it for breakfast and although it's still a bit dense, the taste was great, in fact...brilliant!  This may become a regular thing!

The best breakfast ever, nom nom!

 

Three Ships and an Abbey

Our few days away at a hotel with a spa and a gym had been booked up for ages.  After the house move, Christmas, the return to work and life in general we both felt we had deserved it.  I'd like to say I exercised more than I ate.  But I didn't.  Why is it you eat far more of a hotel breakfast than you ever do in real life?!
Time to do more running (or paddling - after all the rain) down the lanes surrounding our village...(starting week 5 of Couch to 5K programme soon.)

 Before we left I picked the chillies from our plant and left them to dry out on the window sill.  I read somewhere cutting them will encourage more to grow and we do use a lot of chillies :)

  

I hope it works because the plant adds a splash of bright bold colour into the weak winter daylight in the kitchen and cheers the place up.

Then we were off, past some rocks on our way to the south coast...

 Stopping only for a beer and a crossword...

 Day 2 we went to the Portsmouth Historic Docks to buy a family ticket and check it out ahead of a visit later in the year with the boys.  I didn't know what to expect, I'm not massively interested in ships, docks, weavils and that sort of thing but it was a great day out!  We got to wander about the very neat and impressive HMS Warrior which is important for reasons, but I can't remember. Might be the hull.  

 Here she is with the Spinnaker tower in the background on a very overcast day. We were trying to scoot round quickly before the rain started but it turned out to be too good to rush.

 And this is HMS Victory, famous for being Nelson's ship during the Battle of Trafalgar and the place where he was shot and died 3 hours later but only once he knew the battle had been won.  Stirring stuff!

 And below (both below here and below decks) is the inside of the ship.  The photos aren;t great because it was very dark and it's a guided tour so there's little time to take pictures and you're not allowed to use a flash.  Suffice to say it's all very atmospheric and impressive and cramped.  What a life, I'm glad I wasn't a sailor.

The visit included the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship which sank during the battle of the Solent in 154...something and was raised from the seabed a few years ago.  No pictures of that because it was beyond the ability of my camera but well worth a visit of you get the chance. http://www.maryrose.org/
We tootled back via country roads and passed through a place neither of us had been before, Romsey.  I had a feeling Romsey was famous for an Abbey so we parked up behind some houses and walked into town. This must be a very pretty place but the river was only just contained in its banks following the rain and flooding we've been enjoying this year :(  You can see below the water can only just flow under the small bridge.

 The abbey was lovely, as was the cake we shared at a coffee shop for lunch.

 And on the way home, we had to take our chances on a badly flooded bridge.  We made it though!

 While we were away I had my drawing things and continued my Zentangle exploration.  It's becoming quite addictive.

 One completed tile...

 And another...

A busy week coming up.  Not sure how much drawing will get done.

Burns Night Blackout

Being part Scottish I like to join in the traditional celebration of Robert Burns' birthday on 25th Jan.  But being part English, I won't sit in the same postcode as a haggis which is a bag of meat in a sheep's stomach and therefore not for me...or anyone else when I asked if they'd like to try some. So our Burns Supper was going to be a big old roast chicken with some stuffing left over from christmas,  accompanied by Irn-Bru since the boys are too young for whisky.  It was all ready, the chicken was in the oven, the tartan table cloth and Saltire bunting were standing by.  The weather outside had been pretty wet and wild all day but we were smug and toasty inside...and then the lights went out.

And then the water went off.  And then I remembered how much we still had in the freezer.  So instead of welcoming our guest of honour (Himself's mum) to the Country House, we de-camped to her electricity, heat and water supplied house with the part cooked meal, 10 ft of saltire bunting  and half our freezer.  Just in case.

All foiled up and ready to go....

The meal was gorgeous, everyone had a good time and when we got home late in the evening, all power had been restored.  Even the freezer food we'd had to leave had survived.

It had been a rainy, breezy start to the day, but for a short time the clouds lifted a little and I was able to catch up on what the garden's been doing.  It's been busy out there with buds popping out all over the place.

Time for a little birdbox repair too...

And when the rain returned, it was back indoors with Madeleine Peyroux playing chilled music in the background and some Zentangling practice...

I was unsure of what vocabulary to use when talking about these doodles because the concept of tangling, tiles and naming "doodles" has been trademarked and I didn't agree with that.  How can you trademark a doodle?  But now I've been working through the method and getting more familiar with the concept and understanding how it works, I'll use the "official" (still got a tiny issue with it!) language.  So...the 3 1/2" square of card you draw on is called a tile, the patterns you make are called tangles and the whole thing is a Zentangle.  It is relaxing and you do lose yourself in the repetitive lines but I'm learning more than i expected to about actually drawing.  Bonus!  If you want to know more, try here. 

Baking is also a big relaxation for me and as the rain lashed against the windows this morning I was just in the mood for a cup of tea and a nice cake.  We didn't have cake or a lot of time to make one but I found a really fast recipe for muffins and threw in a banana and some blueberries to cuddle up together and create - comfort!

From thought to mouth in less than an hour.  Nom nom!

Mud and Doodles

After days of rain, this morning's clear blue sky drew us outside.   I had my to go for my week 3 couch to 5K run anyway and Himself supported by coming along and jogging beside me.  I'll be back up to speed by end of Feb but having not run at all for most of last year I'm building up slowly.  After a quick pause for a breakfasty, lunchy brunchy thing we set off again, boys in tow for long walk.

 It was long (4 miles).  And it was muddy.  And as much as I enjoyed having a blue sky over my head, the mud was a drag and you can tell I wasn't feeling the joy of it.

The countryside is so dormant at this time of year with confused tones, neither fresh nor colourful and the low sun brings long shadows.

And it's still watery!

And during the wet times of the weekend there was time for this sort of thing...