Julie and Julia!!!

WHAT a grand movie...I just loved it, Meryl Streep is fabulous and so lovable as dear old Joolia. Would happily go and see it again tomorrow. So sweet when she leaves the pound of butter!!...brought a tear to my eye....
BTW Stanley Tucci was also absolutely terrific, I think he is a highly underrated actor...have you seen "The Impostors" with Oliver Platt...very, very funny and includes a fabulous and hilarious scene in a 'patisserie'......

More colour comes to Maine!

The roadsides here in Maine are alive with lovely fluffy asters, the last of the goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace .....it's a beautiful sight!!...looks like a fairy forest, at least that's what my art teacher at school would have said!

A close up of the wild asters...

...and a close up of the asters in my front garden

...some glorious berries in the back of the house...don't know what they are but the colour palette reminds me of traffic lights

A lingering Queen Anne's lace...the smell is beautiful...delicate and old-fashioned, I just found out you can make jelly from it, Colleen's on Route One in Searsport sells a delicious jelly made from the flowers...a very subtle yellow-green colour, quite exquisite.
Oh oh...kinda looks like a snowflake doesn't it...yikes!

...and lingering zinnia's...these flowers have been going FOREVER, I can't believe how they have lasted, I didn't even plant these, they just showed up this year out of the blue. I thought I'd be clever and cut some, hang them upside down in the house and dry them....what a sad sight they were, zinnias DO NOT dry prettily at all!!...don't bother if you're tempted

and finally...who is this cheeky lot?? A bunch of wild turkeys looking very neolithic wandering around at the back of the house....the dogs didn't give a hoot...no howling, no barking, no nothing...I did however have a word with the turkeys and told them to "Run, run for your lives" for, as we humans know, Thanksgiving is coming!!

Why it's a sweetpea in my onesie!!

Welcome to planet Earth Little Maddie!!

This is a picture of my friend Elizabeths' niece's daughter, Maddie, jauntily sporting one of my 'Freshly Baked' onesies, organic no less!! Well done Maddie, you have great taste you little sausage you!!
BTW 'Little sausage' is Brit speak for anyone or anything that is very cute and adorable!!
To buy this and other fantabulous 'Freshly Baked' gifts for the newly arrived Sweetpea in your life please click here! Thank you!!

OMG!!! How adorable is this picture!!

A little field of giraffe cake toppers by Carrie Lynn Fields of Fields of Cake fame, these sweet little guys were just shipped all the way to San Francisco and yea they made it safely!! Carrie is a spectacular baker from Brunswick, Maine who makes the most beautiful and charming custom cakes...you can check her blog here please go have a look at her creations!!, she also has a fan page on Facebook here

The Midas touch in Maine

Goldfingers!! Ha ha. These last few weeks here in Maine have been a flurry of gold leafing activity....

..the shapes, which are aircraft grade aluminium (does that mean anything to you...means nothing to me but if you know aluminium it means a lot!!), have been primed and then sized with a special gold leaf size..size being a clear liquid that is brushed onto the primed surface and then allowed to dry to the point of being squeaky when rubbed with ones knuckle...I'm serious, that's the test for adequate dryness...before the tiny, little, flimsy, floaty, diaphonous gold leaf squares are carefully laid down and gently adhered to the prepared surface.

You need to lay the squares as close to one another as possible and preferably ever so slightly overlapped in order to make the most efficient use of your ever so expensive gold leaf...no wastage allowed....

....after your gold leaf has been laid it is then very gingerly burnished with a ball of cotton...or perhaps even a cotton ball...and any 'holidays' (ie places you've missed with the gold) are filled with the excess leaf floating around and about.

Here yours truly is laying out the letters which I have cut by hand...all thirty two words worth of them...onto the finished gold leafed shapes, you can see some blemishes here but they are burnished away before the final installation of the artwork...which is James' by the way and not mine...here I am the assistant to the Maestro!

Here are just a few of the finished shapes elegantly arrayed on a good old Maine drying rack...how many drying racks have been used before for such an elevated purpose??..you can see glimpses of the words which have been purposely designed in such a way by James so that they appear and disappear as they move in the lightest of breezes, which gives you a hint that perhaps these are part of a kinetic sculpture.

You will have to wait patiently for the next Midas installment when I will reveal the finished sculptures upon which all this divine gold has been lavished....I have to admit gold really is a magnificent metal which transforms the simplest of things into something so elegant and luxurious...and it's practical too...as a finish on a sculpture it can endure the harshest of Maine winters-it even improves with some wind burnishing, it is hard wearing, non-toxic for the environment, looks amazing and doesn't tarnish...what more could you ask for.....'til the next post...keep shining!!

Buttermilk scones from nearly all Maine ingredients

First of all here is my, Lucie and Eleanor's 'homage' to one of the cutest logo's going....have you seen the picture of the real Kate on Kate's packaging, it is truly adorable....

After discovering Kate's real buttermilk...the actual milk leftover after the making of Kate's delicious homemade butter...and when they say homemade they really do mean HOMEMADE...(I just saw a video at the Boston Globe online of the butter being made in Dan Patry's garage...YES his garage click here to see for yourself) ... I started thinking about the things I could make for the blog that featured this delightful ingredient. As I haven't made scones yet they seemed like the perfect place to start, then I thought, you know I could put Maine made blueberry jam on the scones and Maine wildflower honey...and then I realized I could use Maine flour...the only things I didn't use that were made in Maine were the salt, the yoghourt I put on one of the scones and a tablespoon of sugar.
Here's the list of the ingredients:
Kate's butter and Kate's buttermilk, Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Colleen's Homemade (and this also is made in someone's home) blueberry jam, Route One, Searsport, Maine
Swan's wildflower honey, Albion, Maine
Fiddler's Green high gluten flour (also someone's home literally at the back of our fields) Belfast, Maine

The recipe, from 'Having Tea' Recipes and Table Settings by Tricia Foley, is really simple, quick and delish...here we go

INGREDIENTS:
1 3/4 cups flour (I used high gluten just because it was the most appropriate one I could get from Maine...it's like bread flour but you can use regular unbleached white, I have done this recipe with both and could see or taste no discernible difference)
1 tablespoon sugar, any kind you like
1 teaspoon of salt, that's if you don't use salted butter...I always use salted butter so leave out the salt if you do too
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
5 tablespoons/2 1/2 ozs cold butter cut into small pieces ...Kate's sea salted for me
Approx 3/4 cup Kate's buttermilk...depends on the flour and the weather how much of this you will use...I ended up using a good bit less than this but you never know.
1/2 cup raisins if you like them...I do very much, I wanted to use Maine dried blueberries but there weren't any at the Belfast Coop
THE PROCESS:
1. Preheat your oven to 450F
2. Combine dry ingredients together in a largish bowl and mix thoroughly, I also add a little grated nutmeg because I like nutmeg in practically everything I make...especially baked goods.
3. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients...I do this with my hands by 'rubbing' it in, you can use a pastry cutter, two knives if you know how to do that...or do it in a cuisinart...until it resembles fine crumbs...don't overwork and let the ingredients warm up as the butter will start to melt and the recipe will get messed up, and then we'll all have a bad day.
4. Add just enough buttermilk, bit by bit, to make a soft dough
5. Roll out the dough on a floured surface to about 1/2" thick and either just cut roughly into squares or use a round cutter to make little cute circles...I like the rough squares because that's how my Mum did it when I was growing up!!!
6. Bake the little darlings for about 10-12 minutes til nicely browned on the top.
7. Cool, spread with butter, jam, honey, CLOTTED CREAM if you can find it....there's nothing like clotted cream so I drained some maple yoghourt overnight, to stay with the Maine theme, and used that instead...NOT quite the same, I prefer butter and jam or honey on my scones.

Now here's the question we all want answered is it SCOnes as in bones or sconns as in bonbons...for me as a Northern girl it is the former...SCOnes as in bones...but you can say it whichever way you like!!!

Here are the finished scones...somehow they seem to develop their own midway horizontal line where you can gently pry them apart in preparation for the lashings of butter and jam or honey...now all you need is a good cuppa tea!!!

Lucie, who helped me do the baking...what am I saying she DID the baking, and I as usual drank the tea.....anyway, Lucie certainly liked the scones, she ate about 5!, she preferred hers with blueberry jam as she is not a big fan of honey...I went the honey route...Swan's wildflower honey is very floral and redolent...it's fantastic on scones and buttered toast...I bet Winnie the Pooh would like it!!

Bilberries, blaeberries, whortleberries, whinberries, whimberries, fraughns, hurts, hurtleberries or wild BLUEBERRIES!!! Blueberry Curd and a Pavlova...

In North America they are called wild blueberries, in England and Ireland they can be called by any of the title names....whinberries, whimberries, whortleberries, blaeberries, fraughns, hurts, hurtleberries or the most popular, bilberry. Traditionally in Ireland the Sunday nearest to the first of August is 'Fraughn Sunday' when the wild blueberry is celebrated, this year that would have been last Sunday July 26th but things are behind here in Maine where the weather has been overcast and rainy forEVER and that has held up the harvest. Nevertheless some blueberries came into the Belfast Coop in the last couple of days and I couldn't resist buying them and making a little something for James and myself!!

Above is a watercolour painting I did for a Maine company a few years ago celebrating the wild blueberry...it took me a LONG time to paint because capturing the bloom was quite the challenge and there's a lot of blueberries there!!

Here are the ingredients...Maine wild blueberries, organic cane sugar, local eggs from happy chickens, flaked almonds that have been toasted for that divine extra flavour, a little lemon juice for complementary tang and delicious salty butter...organic cream adds more lusciousness!!

...and here are the egg whites whipped to a glossy, marshmallow perfection before being baked into crispy, chewy heavenly meringues...reminds me of making nougat, which I did once and it nearly killed me with the amount of whipping.....which I do all by hand because I am a baking purist fool!!.......plus I have this bogus idea that if you burn all the calories you can whipping and beating by hand it may somewhat ameliorate the amount of calories you consume in the dessert...great idea right????

The final result of my wild blueberry endeavour...a meringue nest with blueberry lemon curd and whipped cream sprinkled with blueberries and toasted almonds...would you like the recipe??

THE RECIPE for my PAVLOVA PALAVER

MERINGUE:

4 egg whites at room temperature

6 ozs white sugar...fine if possible

1 teaspoon of cornflour

1 teaspoon of vinegar

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1. Whip the egg whites 'til stiff

2. Add sugar 2 tablespoons at a time and whip, whip, whip until all the sugar has been added and the result is glossy and dense and divine as the picture above.

3. Pile dollops of meringue onto parchment and spread out into rough and rustic rounds then pipe the meringue in stars around the edge of the 'circles' so as to form a little well in the centre for the blueberry curd to nestle.

4. Mix cornflour, vinegar and vanilla together in a small bowl and then gently fold into the egg whites

5. Bake in a 250F oven for about an hour then turn oven off and leave meringues in there to cool...I started making the meringues on a blissful sunny day with a slight breeze and by the time I was finished the fog had moved in and the damp arrived so my meringues are, ONCE AGAIN, not perfect...the humidity stops them from drying out as much as you want them to and it makes them get sticky really quickly when they are removed from the oven....oh well what can a girl do about Mother Nature??

BLUEBERRY CURD:

1 cup of wild blueberries

2 tablespoons of sugar

1. Put these two ingredients in a heavy bottom pan and heat gently 'til the blueberries give up their juices and pop open, allow to cool slightly before adding the yolks....

3 tablespoons lemon juice (more or less to taste...you can put this in at the end and see how much you like)

4 more tablespoons of sugar

2 egg yolks

2 ozs butter (I always use salted Amish butter that has a bright flavour)

2. Whisk together the yolks and sugar in the top of a double boiler, add the blueberry mix and heat over simmering water and stir constantly until the curd gets nice and thick, it will thicken more as it cools.

3. Allow to cool completely

ASSEMBLY: Spoon the blueberry curd into the well in the centre of the cooled meringues, add a dollop or more of lightly whipped, sweetened heavy cream and scatter artfully with flaked, toasted almonds and the odd unadorned blueberry. James christened this dessert my Pavlova Palaver!!

Happy baking in dry weather...IF you can find it!!!

Delphiniums, blueberries and the haunting scent of milkweed!

For the longest time I thought I didn't like delphiniums and I have to admit it was a prejudice against the name....I made the assumption that the name alluded to some kind of leafy aspidistra looking Victorian foliage-y plant in a big heavy urn in a darkened overly wallpapered room...was I wrong or WHAT!! I am now in love with delphiniums...they are so beautiful, regal and gorgeously coloured in the white, blue, lavendar and lilac pallette. Admittedly my poor delphiniums have been labouring sadly to grow this season what with the unending rain, drizzle, mist, mizzle, fog, thunderstorms and torrential downpours we have been experiencing here in Maine for the last six weeks...yes that does say SIX weeks...very little sun has been glimpsed until about 4 days ago and as a result my plants are leggy and bendy and generally well behind where they should be at this time of the year. I was beginning to think the 'delphs' had no chance at all but they sallied forth and turned into these beauties you see above...they are a little thin and spindly but they are still breathtaking..... and I will never assume again I don't like them because of their glum sounding name...naughty moi!!

The blueberries have not faired well either...I just took this photo on the barren next to our house today and as you can see there are some absolutely full and ripe berries right next to ones which have barely begun to grow...the weather has caused them to ripen very unevenly...they are still beautiful though aren't they?

Now here's a happy bunch..............

...and look at this for textile design inspiration, I did design a blueberry t-shirt for a company here in Maine a few years ago...they were a delight to paint but quite a hard colour to capture because of their bloom...again you can see the uneveness of the ripening.

And here we have milkweed, an unassuming little weed (except that it is toxic and monarch caterpillars dote on it!!!).....quite pretty in it's subtle colouration and beautiful globe like flowers...what is special about this plant is the scent...I have left a whole pod of it to grow around one of James' sculptures and the scent wafting through the house is gorgeous...heady and old-fashioned and very evocative, reminds me of the Yardley scents I grew up with...do any Brits know what I am talking about?? I wish we had smellorama here on the blog!!

Chocolate and English fudge/toffee squares aka Billionaire or Millionaire's shortbread!!

Don't these look yummy? (Who put the fingerprints in the top?) First a layer of shortcake, then a layer of caramel or English fudge topped with a layer of chocolatey ganache lusciousness. I first discovered these hugely sweet, but not cloying, treats at a cafe in the Lake District of Northwest England (by the way one of my favourite places ever, home of Wordsworth and divine rolling hills) and although I don't suppose they are a particularly British dessert (as I did once find a similar delight in Oklahoma) the fudge part is very English. A lot of Brit fudge differs from US in that it is crystallized, crumbly and melty as opposed to soft and chewy. Having grown up with the crumbly version I am very much partial to it, plus my teeth are not so fond of chewy things that threaten to dislodge my 100 year old fillings!!

Here is Lucie stirring the fudge mixture that I fear we overcooked, due to mirth!!, so it was a little harder than I wanted it to be....Lucie had not tasted this kind of fudge before and she was consuming it in such vast quantities and at such a rate of speed (why DO people say that instead of just 'speed') I was concerned she might induce some kind of apoplexy in herself....luckily she just got really happy!!

Again this picture shows the overcookedness of the fudge...it is too caramel coloured and you can see how hard it is as it set instantly when glopped into the case...do not fear though it tasted just fine!!...it was just a little too toothsome and slightly hard to cut.

HERE IS THE RECIPE FOR THE ATTENDANT LAYERS:
SHORTCAKE LAYER
from 'Entertaining with Cranks' (Cranks is a chain of excellent vegetarian restaurants in Blighty and I think they were pretty much responsible, along with Neal's Yard, for the Veggie
Revolution in the UK)

Ingredients:
4oz white flour

3oz butter (I use salted as I like the tang)
1 egg yolk
2 oz sugar

1. Cut or rub or food process the butter into the flour
2. Add the sugar and swish in
3. Make a well in the centre of the mix and add egg yolk, mix with a fork to blend in and then squish together til a ball is formed...as you know try to handle this as little as possible so it doesn't warm up.
4. Squush the ball into the bottom of a springform or removable base piepan that is about 8" diameter.

5. Bake in a 375F oven until pale brown and 'set' remove from oven and allow to cool completely.

CARAMEL/ENGLISH FUDGE LAYER
This is actually a candy/sweet recipe from 'Farmhouse Kitchen 2' for Swiss Milk Tablet

INGREDIENTS:
14 oz white sugar
2 oz butter
7 fl oz condensed milk
4 fl oz half and half or whole milk

1. Put sugar, half and half or milk and butter in a heavy bottomed pan and melt over low heat until sugar is dissolved.
2. Bring to a boil whilst stirring, and add condensed milk
3. Continue boiling and stir constantly so the mix doesn't catch and burn (Lucie and I were laughing and let this happen thus the overcooking and slight overcolouring of the 'fudge')
3. Recipe says to boil til 240F but I think this is too high and the fudge would get really hard so I only let it get to 210 (plus I don't think my thermometer works anyways)...the best way to tell if it is done, and believe you me this isn't a very scientific way...BUT the mixture gets considerably thicker and starts looking like boiling lava..big sputtering bubbles...it also starts to crystallize on the side of the pan...something you actually want in this recipe...if you pour a little of the mix onto a cold saucer when it cools it should be getting crystally and not chewy...sorry this is so vague...honestly however this layer turns out it will still taste GREAT!!! And of course you can do this part on it's own if you just want to have crumbly English fudge.
4. When your intuition tells you it's the right time pour onto the top of the shortcake layer....then allow to cool considerably before pouring on the next layer

CHOCOLATE GANACHEY GOOEY LAYER:For my taste this was actually too much chocolate goo so in future I would make half this recipe...but if you like chocolate go ahead with the full complement!!

INGREDIENTS:
4oz chocolate (whatever kind you like best in whatever form you like best)
1 oz sugar
2 oz butter
3 fl oz whole milk or half and half or cream

1. In a bowl over simmering water melt all the above until well blended...allow to cool before pouring over the fudge.

...and there you have it! Lucie and I made this treat on Wednesday last and I had my final piece yesterday and I must say I think it improved over the days...you know how some things just get better with a little time...this appears to be one of those things!!! Happy crumbling!!

More colour on a rainy day!

'PRISM MANDALA' 2006

I originally finished this 'mandala', an acrylic painting on panel, late in 2006 but just recently I felt compelled to rework some of the layout and now it is refinished as below....

'PRISM MANDALA' 2009

.....there isn't that much difference but I think I have simplified the overall feel of the painting and I prefer the way it looks now. These 'mandala' (circular designs used for meditation) paintings really are meditation for me, they are fun to paint and remind me of Spirograph and Paint by Numbers, both of which I was obsessed with as a child. The watercolour illustration work I do, as in the previous post, is actually hard work that requires a lot of planning, thinking and lengthy execution so when I want to relax and have fun I draw up a complex design on panel and fill the shapes with my happy pastel pallette....a colour wheel I cannot, no matter how hard I try, get away from. The painting is relaxing and pretty mindless and I can make these panel paintings really quite large...up to 4 feet diameter and larger if James is willing to help me do some carpentry which I am useless doing on my own.

It has been raining non-stop here in Maine for what seems like an aeon so I thought I would brighten things up not only with my Prism Mandala but with a picture of some stunning paeonia's from our neighbours garden, they have a beautiful, evanescent scent which makes me smile on yet another dreary weather day!

I had two recipe posts lined up but have recently had some major computer problems and lost all the images I had for these posts...I am rebaking and photographing tomorrow so the next recipe should be up by the weekend...check back for chocolate caramel shortbread squares!!

The robin chicks are growing apace.....

Now the little sweet peas look more like birds and here they are having a relaxing moment in between snacks from Mum and Dad....I am glad they are quite well camouflaged in their nest and no-one, other than me, seems to be bothering them!!

The bees are buzzing and the poppies are popping!

I couldn't resist sharing with you my first popped poppy of the season, don't they look like the skirts of those gorgeous fluffy ballerina dresses.....just this lone one has popped so far but look how many more are getting ready. There will be a veritable sea of them along with a mulititude of lupines...they make a spectacular colour combination....

...here are the bees, you can only see three here but I think there were five on this one poppy alone...the whole field is HUMMING with the wings of busy bees......they are the bees knees!!