Weekend FOs: the Andre, the Christian

Andre wanted to camo hat. I managed to get hold of some Red Heart in camo, which was the absolute perfect colour, but ergh, what horrible yarn. It doesn't actually feel like fibre - it feels more like knitting with some kind of roughened plastic twine. Honestly, you knit with whatever you like, but I am not knitting with this again. All acrylics are not made the same!

It is perfect, though. Took me three attempts to get the size right, but very please with the finished result.

I also made what will hopefully be the last Lumio hat, out of greens scraps I had and begged off Kat at knitting group. Christian requested "a multicoloured beanie" which didn't give me a lot to go on. I am quite pleased with how this one turned out, especially the two tone bobble, which you can;'t see very well here but which looks like the earth. 

Crumbs, I look tired. Roll on the Christmas holidays. 

Stash Enrichment

I bought a few things yesterday at Get Knitted. Firstly, some King Cole chunky for a hat. Jack wants a Dr Seuss style striped top hat. I am worried I will not be finished in time for the end of term. The chunky will help with that. This is very soft and a good shade of red.

Then, some Artesano Alpaca Heather. I managed to pick Tutt for secret Santa this year, though I wonder if it was a fix. This was very awkward because 10 seconds after I had my email with her name in it, I had an email from her asking who I'd got. I had to pretend at lunchtime I hadn't seen it; I'm amazed she didn't smell a rat because she knows I compulsively check my email even during lessons. In the end I managed to find out who someone else had an say that I had that person. Now she wants to go shopping together for the gifts. Mr Z has suggested I buy a box of chocolates while we're out together, and then eat half of them, wrap them up and put them in the secret Santa sack for her. I may well do this, but I will also be knitting her some mittens in this lovely yarn. The colour is her colour of the season (she is like Pantone) - or, at least, as close as I can get to it.

Finally.....mmmmmmmmmm.....

The Artyarns trunk show was at Get Knitted a few weeks ago and we heard these tins were on their way in. I couldn't resist the colours in this one, and when two of the three on display sold during knitting group on Saturday, I had to buy the third. Very indulgent - the cashmere particularly. As you see, it is already wound, because I am worried it will just go into stash and never be seen again, like my last Artyarns purchase. However, it helps that it comes with a pattern. Part of the problem with the last lot is that I cannot come up with a pattern I think is good enough for its majesty.

Sunday Baking: Chocolate Overload

I have a couple of baking blogs in my Feedly reader. One of them is Bakerella, who I think seems to have invented cake pops. She does a lot of cake pop recipes. I am not the cake pop kind. I can't be doing with the sugar paste modelling. Just dip that sucker in melted chocolate and let's eat.

A couple of weeks back, though, she shared this recipe which I just had to make. WOW. It's like you take a chocolate cupcake and then think of everything you can do to it to make it more fattening. Not just chocolate buttercream, not just a caramel filling, but an added drizzle of chocolate ganache, and a topping of toffee popcorn, and then more caramel just in case you were not already in a diabetic coma. I decided I had to give it a go.

It's a long process. It has a lot of steps. But the end result is pretty spectacular. I even broke out my Pampered Chef icing gun thing which I bought 15 months ago and have never used. Here's the recipe - adapted just a little, because I have my favourite go-to caramel recipe.

Cupcakes
1-2/3 cup plain flour
3/4 cup cocoa
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. bicarb
1/2 tsp. salt
2 eggs
2/3 cup whole milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup hot water

Caramel
125g butter
125g caster sugar
1 tbsp golden syrup
Half a tin of condensed milk

Chocolate Ganache
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup butter
175g dark chocolate

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2-1/2 cups icing sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
1-3 tsp. milk (I had chocolate coconut milk in the fridge so I used this)
Toffee popcorn

Instructions
To make cupcakes: Preheat oven to 180˚C and line cupcake tray. Place dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with the paddle until combined. With mixer on low, add eggs one at a time, mixing until just combined - fun! It looks like crumble. Add milk, oil, and vanilla, mixing until combined. Slowly add hot water and mix until combined. Look doubtfully at the extremely wet batter and become convinced this isn't going to go well. Pour batter into cupcake liners until about 2/3 full and bake for 15-18 minutes. Marvel at the alchemy of baking.

To make caramel: Heat the ingredients until the butter and sugar have melted, then bring to the boil and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring constantly. The caramel will start to pull away from the sides of the suacepan when it's done. Remove from the heat and whisk for a couple of minutes until it turns pale. This is my go-to caramel recipe for everything; I cooked it for a bit less than normal so it wouldn't go too solid in the cakes.

To make ganache: Heat cream and butter until just before boiling. Remove from heat and beat in the chocolate. Let sit for one minute and then stir together until completely incorporated and smooth.

To make frosting: Sift sugar and cocoa together in a medium bowl and set aside. Using a mixer, cream the butter. Slowly add sugar in intervals on low speed, mixing until combined. The recipe calls for a whole extra cup of icing sugar but there's absolutely no way I could have got that much into the mixture without it becoming a brick-like entity. Add vanilla, salt, and 1 teaspoon of milk and beat 1-2 minutes. Add more milk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until creamy.

To assemble: Core cooled cupcakes and fill center well with caramel filling. Replace removed cupcake section to cover opening. Pipe chocolate buttercream frosting on top. Top with cooled chocolate ganache. Place popcorn on top of ganache (I used a mixture of Butterkist and that Cadbury chocolate coated popcorn) and then drizzle with more caramel.

Overall, I'm quite pleased. They are a lot more effort than I'd usually go to, but I am planning on sharing a few with my GCSE class on Tuesday (who will be extremely depleted thanks to trips and exams) so I wanted to wow them. I think my buttercream could have been a bit stiffer - I went a bit overboard with the milk because it was so stiff to begin with. Also, I need to practise my piping. Project for the new year, maybe.

Italy: The Beach

I guess there's not masses to say about the beaches. A beach is, I guess, a beach. On Sunday we packed our beach bags and headed off south in search of "the Maldives of Salento". We didn't find it; but we found a couple of other very passable places to stop for a swim. I've just spent a very enjoyable half hour searching for them on Google maps and have managed to pinpoint the exact locations on the map.

The first place we stopped was Leuca, which is where the Ionian and Adriatic seas meet. Nancy Dell'olio promised me in a magazine article that the colour of the sea here was dazzling. It was pretty, certainly, but I think the Adriatic looked maybe a little more spectacular further north.

We found our spot on the beach and made like tourists. For me, this involved slathering myself with a combination of SPF20 tanning oil (which needed using up) and SPF 30 spray on (for the hard-to-reach bits) until it formed a paste and all the sand stuck to me. I found my sarong in a bag the other day and it still smells of this day. I have put it to wash but I don't want to.

I rocked the bikini here too. I had to give myself a good talking to because, yknow, I am pretty fat; I just kept repeating that phrase. "How to get a bikini body? Put a bikini on your body." I like swimming in a bikini: it is totally different to swimming in a suit (duh!). It helped that everybody else on the beach was also wearing a bikini, regardless of age or size.

We basked for a while, reading and taking the odd dip in the sea. It felt like we were there for hours but it was probably not very long; we're neither of us particularly beach types. After a while we decamped to this shady cafe and refreshed ourselves. You can see the spot where we were sunbathing just behind the parasol pole.

After this we went for a short walk and then Tutt drove us onwards. This was a bit fraught because the roads were very windy. Being stuck behind a bus was a very good thing because it meant there was no need for Italian-style speeding, but it was all a bit tense, especially when she tried to overtake the bus after being beeped and it started moving, so she stopped and then everyone stopped - bus, person behind, person thinking about coming from the front - and I shouted at her: "Just go!". Awkward. I was relieved when we were discussing this the other day that she didn't seem to remember, or at least, pretended she didn't. It meant that by the time we stopped here, conversation was short.

But it didn't matter, because look how fab this is! It was all very rocky and we had to squeeze round a barrier to get down the steps, but everyone else was. There was a big boulder down there that seemed to have detached from the rock face, which is probably why, but the Italians evidently don't care about that sort of thing. The lip of the shore was concrete and we lay out our towels in the shade - my kind of beach, no pesky sand - and I did some more swimming, but was not quite brave enough to just pitch off the edge like everybody else, even though the water was pretty deep.

You can see my shadow in this one. Glorious sea! Just, wow. And then we returned to Lecce and had that amazing meal with all the cheeses. Magical.

Italy: Lecce

We drove south from the Gargano peninsula on the Saturday morning; we thought we'd gone the same way but it was a different road and took quite a lot longer. The landscape is quite flat and featureless. It reminded me a bit of that time I drove to Cambridge, only hotter, with prettier plants.

Upon arriving in Lecce we checked into a hotel that was straight out of Madmen: the Presidente. Enormous room, two beds (at last!), a red hallway that looked like the set for the Shining, lots of 50s features. I loved it. I thought I would have to use some Italian but the desk lady spoke perfect, though heavily accented, English.

Come play with us. Ahem.

Lecce is a real hidden gem. What a lovely city! It's full of amazing features, like the Roman amphitheatre and theatre, and the fortress built by Charles V to ward off attack by the Ottomans, and these things are right there in the street with everybody wandering past, like it's totally normal. There are some ridiculously ornate churches, lots of shops and gelaterias, and not thousands of people. Lovely.

They've dug up less than half of the amphitheatre. It's pretty big - I'm at street level taking this picture.

These apartment courtyards look out onto the Piazza del Duomo. What a great place to live!

It was difficult to photograph the theatre, which was completely deserted and smelled very strongly as though people had been weeing on it, although there was a public loo right next to it. No, the smell was not from the loo. Actually, places smelling of wee became a theme of the holiday.

There was also a jazz festival going on while we were there, so as I sat enjoying this glass of wine....

....we were also enjoying the jazz pianist playing in the amphitheatre around the corner. Well, I was enjoying it. Tutt doesn't really hold with jazz.

Incidentally, this meal was absolutely amazing. We ate the first night in the hotel, which was great (amazing salad buffet that reminded me of skiing in Sauze) and the last night in a bar that sold antipasti that was just OK; but the second night we ate at Terra and I had this cheese platter.

See those dips? Honey, apple sauce, and some kind of A.MAZ.ING. shallot paste stuff. It was delicious. I was in heaven - cheese, olives, bread, wine, and oil/balsamic which I poured into what turned out to be the ash tray. It was fun eating here; there was a scooter parking rank opposite and we enjoyed watching people come and go all night. Italians won't let a scooter get in the way of a killer outfit.

I also had probably the best ice cream of our trip in Lecce, at a cafe close to the amphitheatre. I went in for an affogato but the woman looked confused and I ended up with this sundae of vanilla and chocolate ice cream, with coffee and cream. What a pity. That vanilla ice cream was very dense and creamy. Mmmmmm. I should have taken a picture of it, but I was photographing a lot of meals and feeling a bit weird about it.

Would I come back? Hmm, let me think....

Definitely. Although the town isn't very big and wouldn't provide many more days of exploring, the beaches are less than an hour away and I think it makes a great spot for exploring them. 

More on beaches in the next post. 

Fave Friday

Bit random this one, but I love it when houses are being demolished and you can see what was once inside the rooms. This is the old inside of the Highwayman pub, recently demolished just up the road towards to 'wood from us.

Uplifting Song of the Week

So, I made it all the way through NaBloPoMo without missing a day and then went cold turkey as soon as December hit, and all week I have been going to bed with a creeping feeling that something has been left undone! And, that post count isn't getting any closer to 127 on its own (I have many Italy blog posts to go - just need to find time to sit and write them), so, here I am, back on the wagon.

I have instituted Song of the Day with my tutor group, who are taking it in turns to pick a daily ditty to brighten up registration in the afternoon. One of them picked Spandau Ballet - Gold which was a great shout: everybody got into the spirit, singing along to that. I am very much enjoying my time with them. This is why you have a tutor group all the way through.

I'm going with something a bit softer for my "...of the week" board next week. It's quite a simple song and unplifting in a quieter way, but I am a bit obsessed with it. It even makes me feel a bit Christmassy but maybe that's just because it's coming up to Christmas.