A rescued failure

I have been making cakes of all sorts for too many years that I care to remember but I have never ever made successful florentines.  On Saturday afternoon as the weather was awful I thought I'll have another go.  I found a recipe and followed it to the letter (not something I do very often).  I measured everything really carefully, set the oven as instructed - even heating it up first and cooked them for exactly the time stated.  Result - disaster!  They spread out all over the tin and stuck fast.  With a huge amount of hacking I managed to separate them from the tin in thousands of pieces but undeterred decided I could use then for florentine ice cream!  It was delicious though somewhat chewy - too much florentine and not enough ice cream I think.  The first picture is what they should have looked like, the second one is the "bits" and the third picture is the ice cream.

Penguins and a Scorpion

By special request I am putting a picture of Alison's 50th birthday cake on my blog.  I was too busy to make one so asked Helen Rollinson who makes cakes for a business to make me one - the brief was iced with marzipan and either sailing or Antartica.  I might add that I gave Helen less than two weeks to come up with something.  This is the result and underneath the icing a delicious carrot cake.

Knitting

It is over a month since my last blog - that's because I have spent the last month knitting squares for Zoe's Brownies.  Before I could start I had to search the cupboards and the loft for wool and needles.  The first lot I found had a no. 7, a no 8 and a no. 11 needle but not a pair.  When I eventually found the matching needles I tackled my first square using some grey wool I found.  Those of you who have known me a for a long time will recognise this as the grey wool from a and grey and white sweater I started to knit many years ago!!  The wool was a bit dull in colour so made a trip to the newly opened wool shop in Weymouth and bought some new wool.  It took two or three attempts to get something square but once I had got the hang of things I managed a respectable number of squares which I posted off to Zoe today.  This is the result.