Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Today I Learnt:

  • How to do a provisional cast-on. It took me about an hour, some tangled yarn and confusion with various guides but in the end Knitty came to my rescue and joy was unconfined.
Yay! See the way I basically cast-on to waste yarn? So clever.
  •  How to make Kipferl. These are seriously good biscuits, I would say I was operating on a 'one for me, one for the oven' ration with the dough. I got the recipe from my W.I Book of Biscuits - a present from my sister years ago which I love. It is one of the great sadness's of my life (along with not being French and 2'' taller) that I will probably never get a chance to join the W.I to make Jam and sing Jerusalem.   
The recipe makes 48. There are now considerably less.


Vanilla Kipferl
 225g butter
225g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla essence
100g ground almonds
100g caster sugar
Pinch of salt
Sifted icing sugar for coating

Rub the butter into the flour and work in the remaining ingredients to make a stiff dough. Chill for 1 hour.
Heat the oven to 160 Celsius / 325 Fahrenheit.
Take walnut-sized pieces of dough and roll into small fat sausages, about 2cm wide and 6cm long. Form into crescent shapes.
Arrange on ungreased non-stick baking sheets and bake for 20 min until golden.
Leave to cool for 3 min and then dip in icing sugar. Cool completely on wire racks.
Apparently they taste even better after a couple of days, if there are any left by then.

    Thursday, October 14, 2010

    Free Stuff

    Looky what the postman brought me today - free books! I finally got around to spending an Amazon gift certificate last weekend and I chose the latest in the River Cottage Handbook series. I already have their guides to Bread and Preserves, and I think the books are simply lovely as objects in themselves. Very excited to get planning the veg patch for next year with the help of this little tome. Hopefully I will have lots of success to report here in Spring!

    Not strictly free but near enough....
    The properly free book was this:

    Free as a bird
    I signed up to the Early Reviewers group on LibraryThing a while ago, hopefully chose my books each month and suddenly - I get one! I actually can't even remember picking it out but it looks like it has potential. The story follows a Castrati in 18th century Vienna, so it ticks a fair few boxes for me. Now all I have to do is get around to reading it (not easy - the books are starting to pile up on the nightstand), take notes and write a useful review for the site. Eeek! A proper review!