Thing #10 - blueberry muffins

I haven't actually fallen by the wayside, I just haven't posted for a few reasons. One is that the internet connection seems to be up and down, which is very annoying. Another is that it's been a weird few days and my head is a bit all over the place. I finally got to the point where I couldn't cope with my commute to and from work any longer, so I've resigned. I'm leaving at the end of the month, and while I'm very sad to leave because my workmates are so lovely, I won't miss the travelling, constant exhaustion, lack of a social life because I'm always tired, forking out £160 a month for petrol and the awful, awful traffic. I'm also thinking about a complete career change and retraining to become some sort of baker or chef (the former being my dream job), but it's a big decision that needs a lot of thought so I'm not rushing into it.

Aaaaanyway. Sorry for rambling. I have made something, or part of something, every day in February and some of it wasn't edible so I'll try and catch up over the weekend, but the photo above is what I made today. Blueberry muffins, and the recipe is here.

Thing #3 - mutant muffin

I promise I'm not turning this into a food blog. But the fact is, I like food and I like cooking.

I fancied some lemon and poppy seed muffins like the ones I used to get in Starbucks when I worked in London, so I made a batch of these. The recipe is from this book (which is excellent, by the way). This one got dislodged from its place in the tin in the oven and turned out a bit... odd. Almost as if it had a nose.

It was still yummy though!

Thing #2 - a fabric flower

Yesterday on Thing A Day, bittyandbunny posted some gorgeous fabric flowers. When I saw them I immediately wanted one for myself, so tonight I set about making one. Here it is. I want to make another one, a huge oversized black one.

The fabric was some nasty polyester lining that I was never going to find a use for - nice to figure out a way to make it into something I like.

Thing 1 - Oatmeal biscuits (or cookies if you're American)

This is my old weighing scale. I've had it for about six years, and prior to that, when I lived in Ireland, I had a very similar but less pink one. It's always served me well. I dump a few ounces of flour and sugar and so on into the bowl, mix it up by hand or with the aid of an electronic implement, throw it in the oven and it turns into scones, biscuits, cakes, pastry or whatever.

Unfortunately, pounds and ounces have recently become extinct and all my newer cookery books give the measurements in metric only. My mind doesn't think in metric, and apparently my eyes don't see in metric either because the metric measurements on my old pink scale are impossible to see. I made some blueberry muffins yesterday from a Nigella cookbook and they turned out lovely but I ended up with terrible eyestrain from trying to see where 125g was on the dial.

There were two solutions to this problem - either I sat down with a calculator and a pencil and converted all the recipes back to imperial, or I bought a new scale with a big, easy to see display designed for the (nearly) blind. I went for option two. Here's my new scale which I bought yesterday.


Obviously I had to try it out, so I made some oatmeal biscuits tonight. Yum yum. They're from the Be-Ro cookbook, and if you'd like to try them (and I strongly recommend you do) the recipe is here.

So here's my first Thing for February. Oatmeal biscuits. And now I'm off to make a cuppa.