Banana Bread; with Berries, Coconut & Other Additions

I always buy bananas and then forget to eat them, and I cannot stand them when they start to go a bit brown. Luckily, this is when they are perfect for banana bread and I LOVE banana bread, so I end up making it pretty often!

I feel like even though it is cake, it's healthy cake as there is so much fruit in it, so it's perfectly acceptable to eat lots of it - especially when it's straight out of the oven.

After a few months of making plain banana bread, I started to experiment and add other ingredients in, such a raisins, frozen berries, coconut, carrot and most recently fudge!

I had found some fudge in our kitchen cupboard which had gone a bit hard so not good for eating but perfect for cooking. I was all set to bake my banana fudge muffins and then discovered that our housemates who had moved out the previous weekend had clearly owned (or just wanted) our kitchen scales so had taken them with them! As I had all my ingredients laid out ready, I didn't want to just not bake so I thought I'd have a go at guesstimating the weights of everything....

It started out ok with butter, sugar and then eggs, but by the time I got to adding the flour, I think I got a bit carried away. Then it looked too thick so I added lots of milk to make it runny, and then it just didn't look like normal cake mixture...it was still a bit thick but tasted of flour so I didn't want to add any more so I just scooped the mixture in to the paper cases and hoped for the best!

They turned out a bit like rock cakes or scones more than fairy cakes, still nice, and the banana and fudge combination was amazing, I will definitely have to try and make them again, but this time I have some shiny new lime green electronic scales, so I will actually follow the recipe!

Africa

I've been watching the Africa series, catching bits every so often as they seem to be repeated a lot and I am in love with it! I'm also a little bit in love with David Attenborough, I could listen to him talking about absolutely anything, I just find his voice so soothing.

Anyway, inspired by this programme, and the success of my elephant mobiles, I decided to branch out and add in some other African animals into a mobile. I also used some African batik fabrics which I bought in Tanzania and Zambia which I think compliment the animals colours beautifully and also add to the African theme of the mobile. Here are some pictures...

A Bit Of A Pants Update

So after my exciting week and a bit surrounded by pants I was very excited to see some of the final photos from the shoot they were used from. These images should be loaded onto the Boden website fairly soon but in the meantime here are a few background shots which show off my beautiful pant decorations perfectly....

Eating In Season

I've read a lot of articles recently on eating in season and it's something that I try and follow quite strictly, to the point where I won't buy my favourite berries except for a few months in the summer. I love that in our local Sainsburys they've just started to add in labels in the Fruit and Veg section indicating which items are in season at the moment, which really helps to know what to buy at any one time of the year.

I find that British vegetables just taste so much better, which is hardly surprising as a lot of air freighted vegetables are picked before they are fully ripe, so they last the journey and for long enough in the supermarkets, with the idea that they will ripen on our supermarket shelves. However, as we rarely have the weather warm enough to ripen them, I find they always taste a bit raw and definitely not to their best.

In contrast, you can get amazing chunky potatoes and apples this time of year which are massive and full of flavour and have probably come from within 100 miles of London, which is just amazing. I love when supermarkets put the name of the farmer and the farm on the food products, it makes it feel some homely and the next best thing from buying straight from farmers markets.

This website http://eattheseasons.co.uk/foodseasons.htm is brilliant to give an idea of what you can get and when and I've been making some delicious root vegetable based dishes this time of year. Whilst I love being able to buy piles of berries in the summer, there is also something very comforting about munching on all these wholesome and homely root vegetables while it's cold and frosty outside.

A Whole Lot Of Pants

Recently, my room has been full of pants. Not because I haven't been doing any washing, but because I bought lots of pants. About 80 pairs to be exact. This wasn't just a random extreme shopping spree, but I was commissioned to make a lot of pants themed things for a shoot today so stocked up on a lot of kids pants to make them.

The first thing I had to make was a pants themed quilt! I cut all the pants in half to make a crazy patchwork style quilt and kept adding them in to make it into a large rectangle. This looks really cool but where the pants have binding around the top and the legs they were really thick and my sewing machine was not particularly happy to sew through such thick layers!!

 

I had 3 packs of different designs, each in 7 different colours so I had to arrange them carefully to make sure that there weren't any of the same colour next to each other, and make sure they fitted in in the best possible way. 

When I brought it into the office though to send off to the shoot, the person who asked me to make it said to me genuinely seriously 'oh that's amazing....we should use that in a shoot you know' As if I'd just made it for fun???

I also made some pant bunting, and I sewed each pair of pants slightly into a triangle so that they didn't just look like pants hanging on a washing line! 

Finally I made some pant flags and some pant hats, using thin wire to make them stand up and look cartoon like. These were all used in a kids shoot on Friday so hopefully I'll get to see the final pictures tomorrow which I am very excited about!

New Year, New Adventures

I have always wanted to go skiing. I begged my parents when we were younger to take us skiing, especially as loads of our family used to go every year. Sadly my parents ignored my pleas and never too me skiing, so when I got invited to go for New Year, my answer was YES straight away, no thinking necessary.

We went to Les Arcs, in the French Alps and of course signed up for adult beginner lessons, taught by the very charming Renee who had clearly been skiing his entire life, and was very laid back about everything, but a brilliant teacher. I'm a very competitive person, and Dave, my boyfriend, had been skiing in the same resort last year, as a beginner, so I was determined to keep up with him! Despite being very nervous at the start skiing down a slope which was only marginally not flat, I did pick it up quickly, and by the first afternoon I was tentatively sliding down a blue run.

The resort was beautiful, you could pretty much ski straight out of the chalet door to the ski lifts and then there were miles and miles of blue sky and soft fluffy snow. The snow was 2.5m deep at the top of the mountains which was insane!! I've never ever seen that much snow and was incredibly excited.

Despite some nerves (one slope I skidded down on my bum as I was not happy to ski down it) mostly it was just amazingly fun, and we whizzed through the speed barriers (at a very fast seeming 34kmph) and generally had lots of fun. We'd have our lessons in the mornings from 9.30am till about 12pm and then head straight back up to the tops of the mountains, have a picnic somewhere and then spend the whole afternoon exploring, until usually trying to get one of the last lifts to get the most out of our days as possible.

All in all, I LOVED skiing and can't wait to go again next year. I'm currently researching Scottish ski resorts for a ski shoot at work so maybe a trip will come up sooner...

Does a Smoothie Need a Hat & Other Random Things For Charity

Whilst on a wander in Sainsburys the other day, I noticed that the Innocent Smoothies appeared to be wearing hats....little knitted hats! I had a nose and read the labels and realised that it was all for charity. Innocent have asked people to knit little hats for their smoothies, and then 25p from each bottle goes to Age UK to help older people keep well and warm this winter. Lovely, but very random! http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/bigknit

The little bottles do look very comical though, and very cosy, although it does seem sad to keep them in the fridge and then give them hats, it would seem fairer to let them be cosying in together around a nice warm fire, still in their little hats!

This has made me think about all the other people I have seen collecting for charity this time of year. There are always the charity 'muggers' around all the time, trying to get you to sign up to sponsor certain charities  but this time of year there seem to be people everywhere collecting, outside the tube, outside supermarkets, around shopping centres, they seem to be popping up everywhere. Now most of the collectors I've seen this time of year seem to be dressed as Santa but a very very pathetic poor attempt at Father Christmas. I don't think one of them has had a beard and not all of them have had hats.

The worst one I saw yesterday was outside Peter Jones in Sloane Square who had some dodgy looking red trousers, and an open Father Christmas jacket, with his North Face puffa jacket clearly sticking out underneath! Rubbish! He looked like he was half asleep and had only just managed to drag himself out of his pyjamas to come and collect money! The man himself was very lively and I'm sure was doing a good job but it was just such a terrible effort with the fancy dress! You kind of think that if you're going to go out dressed as Father Christmas you're at least going to do it properly! Like the smoothies!!