Baking or Sewing, Try Both

We had some lovely rain last night, in fact it rained right through to around 1:30, just right to take Ben for his walk. I did take him out early but, unlike him, he was not impressed and soon turned and headed for home at a rate of knots.

Once he was dried off and fed I turned to my quilt top, all the rows were sewn and 3 of those were sewn together from last night. I got the rest sewn and pressed quite quickly. The top finishes at 60" by 70", a bit too small for my liking but will make a lovely sized quilt for Kaitlyn. I did think about adding a border or 2 to bring it up to double size but have another 2 scrappy quilts almost at the finish line and I want to press on.

I must have been having an "off kilter" week when I made the blocks, there are several places where the points are out of line but Kaitlyn will not care and I am not going to stress over it. I did unpick and re sew a few blocks, just the ones that were too bad to ignore. I have a lovely floral fabric to back it and I think I will quilt this on my Janome 8200 QC, I have a quilt on the frame and 2 more ready to go. I quite fancy some straight line quilting with the walking foot, and maybe a few of the fancy stitches as well.

Once the top was pressed I had a look out and it was still raining, I could have blitzed the kitchen but instead decided to bake.

There are loads of wild strawberries in the valley and the warm wet conditions means that they are dripping with fruit. These are large for wild berries and very tasty, I spotted a recipe for Gooseberry crumble cake on a couple of blogs and thought that the strawberries would make a nice variation.

I made 2 smaller ones and added a handful of oats to the crumble, they took around 40 minutes to bake and look and smell lush. I will be giving one away and slicing and freezing (most) of the other.

While I had the oven on I made a couple of Banana cakes, I normally use Nigel Slater's recipe but could not remember where it was so dug out Lorraine Pascal's book and used her version. Well that is not quite true, I added Macadamia nuts and dark chocolate instead of the Pecans that she uses. Again they look and smell great, and again I will gift one and slice and freeze one.

I need a tried and tested gluten free cake recipe to make for Maggie, so if any of you have one that you can share I would be most grateful.

I am going to have a rest now, the kitchen is almost to rights and dinner will be something with new potatoes and veg. I just have a batch of Hummus to make, I love that stuff, so may well just have a goodly dollop on my veg.

I have a book to finish reading before I go to the library tomorrow, so it is feet up for an hour.

                         TTFN                                                   Pam

BTW, the quilt blocks were sewn in 2013, I bought the book by Elizabeth Dackson as soon as it was published, so it was more recent than I thought.