Stoma Cakes and WOYWW

This evening I suddenly remembered it was Wednesday and time for WOYWW! Better late than never… That seems to be my theme recently.

Here’s my desk as it is today.

I’ve been working on some Zentangle tracings of photos I took in Mamhead Woods when we went with friends last month. I am making a small album (2 copies, one for me and one for them) and am going to overlay some of them with tracings done on parchment paper. See here for more details of this.

I haven’t done any more since that post because I’ve been pretty busy with other things.

On Saturday we went to Montacute in Somerset, and had a lovely day out.

This coming Saturday, my hubby is very kindly driving me to Somerset again, for an Ileostomy Association meeting – I don’t usually ask him to take me to meetings as far afield as this, but it’s the 60th anniversary and I thought it would be good to go to that one – the Devon and Somerset branch covers quite a large geographical area. As well as the usual things (lunch, the committee stuff, reps from supply companies showing their products, a speaker, a supplies exchange table and a raffle), because it’s a special meeting, they’ve decided to hold a cake baking competition. With my love of baking I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Unfortunately Mary Berry wasn’t available to judge the cakes… I know that my baking isn’t up to winning standard, and I expect there will be some beautifully iced offerings and this is something I can’t manage to do, but nothing daunted, I thought I’d enter anyway because it’s fun! To make it more fun, I decided to make some stoma cakes and see if anyone recognises what they are!! I might get the booby prize for giving people a good laugh, anyway!

So yesterday I rolled up my sleeves and got baking. I finished the icing this morning.

Here are the stoma cakes.

Note the chocolate chip in the centre of each one or a bit of added realism!!!

This time I decided to make marble cake, so I made up two mixtures, one plain and one chocolate, and mixed them together without stirring too much. The plain mixture had a generous dose of vanilla extract and the chocolate mixture was flavoured with cocoa powder, and the resulting cake has a delicate chocolate flavour, as well as looking quite interesting! I used a basic Madeira cake recipe which is nice and moist.

While making them, I had a complete mental aberration – I was putting alternate spoonfuls of the two mixtures into the cup cake cases and thought the plain mix seemed a bit runny, and suddenly realised I hadn’t put the flour in! Duh… A narrowly averted disaster! I scooped out as much as I could and added the flour, but they were a bit of a mess! I had originally decided to make 12 stoma cakes, and then use the rest of the mixture to make a larger square cake to cut into portions, but to be sure I got a decent enough batch to take on Saturday, I made a second lot, and kept the others for home consumption. There was enough mixture left for a half-sized square cake which yielded a few portions.

I had made enough of the pale pink icing for the stoma cakes, but made too much of the red icing, so I used this up on the other cakes, just swirling it on with the piping bag, and added some candy sprinkles for decoration.

Here are the resulting cakes.

I wouldn’t normally use such lurid red icing on my cakes!!

I made them in good time for Saturday, as the buttercream stomas are quite thick, and will take a few days to firm up and be safe for transporting to Somerset. I’ll let you know how I get on in the competition, and whether they go down all right, and whether anyone recognises what they are!!

I also made an almond and cherry cake from my mum’s old recipe. She used to make it in a round tin and put whole almonds on top, but I used my usual baking frame and cut it into portions. To make the cutting easier, I used flaked almonds rather than whole ones.

This is a lovely moist cake. I add more almond essence than the recipe says, as I like a good robust flavour!

Last time I baked, I made some coffee drizzle cake as an experiment. I love lemon drizzle cake and wondered if it would work as well with coffee – the result was a delicious moist and flavoursome cake, but the top did not end up nice and crunchy like on the lemon version. I forgot to photograph these. Most of them are now in the freezer.

In between all this activity I’ve been pretty exhausted and resting a good deal of the time. I’ve done a few more Zentangle samples for my album and a lot of preparation for my Bible study group which is going very well.

Have a great week, everybody.

Tracings for Mamhead Album

Continuing to work on the two copies of my mini-album commemorating our visit to the fabulous Mamhead Woods a few weeks ago.

On my last WOYWW post, I shared the first Zentangle tracing I did of one of my manipulated photos. I’ve had another two or three sessions working on further tracings.

Some of them didn’t lend themselves well to Zentangle, so I’ve just done straight tracings, and I may add some gold, or some colour, to these – not sure yet.

These first two tracings were done using a sepia pen to echo the photo underneath.

This was done with the usual black pen.

Today I started working on tracings of the manipulated tree trunks photo – this was desaturated and then made into a negative image and posterised and I really like the effect. I thought the tree trunks would work well with ribbon-style Zentangles and I’m quite pleased with the result.

I may add a little more. Here’s the tracing a bit closer up.

Here it is in situ over the photograph.

I ran out of steam before starting on the pair of this one, and had to come down and have a cup of tea and rest! More another day.

Montacute

Warning: picture-rich post

Yesterday my hubby and I went off to Somerset for the day. We haven’t used our National Trust membership recently and although we’d planned on lots of outings this spring and summer, somehow we have both been busy and it hasn’t happened. In the end we had a wonderful day out, in a beautiful place, and the weather was fine, if a bit windy, and we had lunch and tea in the open air in the courtyard outside the restaurant.

As usual I took lots of photos. Here is a selection.

The garden surrounded by these stone balustrades, with the stone pavilions at each corner, was full of simply gorgeous flowers of all colours.

The house is built of lovely warm-coloured stone, and has numerous little alcoves and other embellishments. It is a Tudor house and very beautiful.

This is the orangery.

In this picture you can see the old Victorian heating pipes.

It is filled with interesting plants.

I got some interesting shots of these giant ferns.

I am always amazed how often the Fibonacci series appears in nature – here is the famous nautilus spiral – in the leaves of a begonia!

This is the entrance where we went into the house. My hubby with Yum Sing in his rucksack!

The stewards were all dressed in Elizabethan costume.

The first room we came to was the great hall. On the far wall is a plaster relief depicting a Skimmity Ride, when couples of dubious moral character were paraded in effigy through the community and pilloried by the locals – this event was graphically described by Thomas Hardy in “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

At the other end of the great hall are the stone archways where we came in.

A beautiful stained glass panel in one of the doors leading to the garden.

In one of the rooms, in the plasterwork frieze running along under the ceiling, was the depiction of a rather curious-looking elephant – we wondered if the artist had ever actually seen one, or whether he created it from someone else’s description!

A beautiful Chinese cabinet.

One of the bedrooms had an en-suite bathroom!

There were beautiful doors and carved panels everywhere.

A detail of the inlay on a lovely little semi-circular table.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more delicate and lovely set of library steps than these.

Beautiful stained glass windows in many of the rooms.

Here is the Elizabethan lady again, kindly posing for me in the beautiful doorway.

I’d love to have slipped this bed into the back of the car when nobody was looking…

At the foot of the bed was this magnificent chest.

In one of the rooms there was an exhibition of vintage embroidered samplers. The work was so fine and the detail amazing.

We both thought this one was particularly charming.

On the top floor is the long gallery. This one was relatively plain compared with those in other houses we have visited, which have magnificent moulded plaster ceilings. They had a collection of works of art painted by contemporaries of Holbein, from the National Portrait Gallery.

More Elizabethan stewards.

Going back outside, we were amused by this enormous box “hedge” – how did they clip the top?!!

The top of one of the many stone alcoves.

A view of the house from below – we went down to the stable block where there was a second hand bookshop. I didn’t buy any, but of course my hubby came away with about six!

Some amazing tree roots. I thought these would lend themselves to Zentangle art!

Going in to the restaurant to order our lunch (we had some simply delicious butternut squash quiche and salad), I was highly amused at this – “Got a food allergy? Have a dog biscuit!”

Later, we returned to the courtyard for a cream tea. Around this courtyard where we ate, there were several unusual benches carved from logs, in the shape of different kinds of clothes pegs.

The corner of the courtyard, with the old pump.

As we left, I got some photos of the gate house:

and also of some of the buildings in the beautiful village just by the entrance.

It was quite a long and tiring day, and quite a long drive to get there, too, but it was worth it!