The story of my morning tea

So I started my new nursery job yesterday. I've just had two whole days of 'induction,' which is basically a lot of talking about fire drills, and where the brooms and spades are kept and so on. Necessary, but brain-frizzling, especially when I haven't really had to concentrate on anything more onerous than the nutritional information on the back of a Rafferty's baby food packet for about two years.

Anyway, I searched high and low on my computer for an appropriate native plant picture but couldn't find one I was happy with. I did, however, find pictures of the cupcakes I made the other day, so I'll tell you about that instead.

[Alternative post titles considered: Opinions on Red Velvet Cake or Why You Should Always Check the Pantry for Ingredients Before You Begin]

Over the weekend I decided that it was high time I made a Red Velvet Cake (read the bit about the historical indicator reaction between cocoa and vinegar making the cake red coloured; how cool is that?!) Yes, I got the idea from Masterchef, I admit it. I tend to make half recipes of baked items these days, since I'm the one who tends to eat it all I figure it helps me eat a little less sugary-carby goodness (actually, what really happens is that I eat it at the same rate I usually do but it's gone in half the time, leaving me with an earlier opportunity to make something else.)

Anyway, I found a recipe (there are dozens so I won't link one). The funkiest ingredient was buttermilk, but that's OK because I happened to find powdered buttermilk in a healthfood shop a while ago and it's wonderful as a pantry backup item since buttermilk is not something I usually buy. I got started: butter, sugar, eggs, buttermilk, red food colouring, bicarb...plain flour. Plain flour? Oh, bugger, no plain flour. Oh well, I'll just use self-raising flour. It's only a half recipe after all.

I pop it in the greased tin, there's plenty of room (what's that line? "Never assume anything. It makes an Ass out of U and Me.") Into the oven. Walk away.

Some time later I can smell a distinct burning scent, wafting it's way through the living room. I glance over at the oven. Cake looks OK, nicely risen to the top of the tin, still 10 minutes left on the timer. But a few minutes later this burning smell is increasing and odious. So I look again, thinking there must be some crumbs stuck to the oven element. And indeed there is something stuck to the element, but it is not crumbs, it is half a Red Velvet Cake, which has overflowed the tin and dripped down over all the wire racks and the oven base.


It seems that bicarb soda and SR flour make a cake rise even more than I'd imagined, and wasn't it fun cleaning that lot up out of the oven?! Half the cake was actually edible and we ate it, but I didn't enjoy it. I wasn't sure if I was just imagining it or not, but I thought I could taste just a hint of the bitter extra bicarbonate.


So I wasn't satisfied. A few days later I wanted to try again, and this time with plain flour, and I thought I might make cupcakes so I could fit them into my lunch box easily (yes, I have to take a lunch box to work now.) I followed the recipe carefully, but left out the food colouring since it does nothing for the taste. I made sure to only half fill the patty pans, since I wasn't sure how much the mixture would rise if one didn't overdo the rising agents.


And they came out cute and rounded.


And they're quite nice, but to be perfectly honest - and I'm sorry to all Red Velvet aficionados - I'd rather have a little chocolate mud cake any day. The RV cake is lovely and moist, and has a good texture, but I found it a little insipid and didn't have much depth of flavour really.

However, as Matt Preston would say, there is a hero in this dish. D had been out to a friend's birthday the night before and when he was telling me what they'd ate I mostly heard 'meat meat meat beans cupcakes peanut butter icing.' What what what? Peanut butter icing? How have I never heard of this before? Cakes, biscuits, ice creams, satay sauce yes, but icing? Must. Make. Peanutbuttericing.

I tried it out: beating together about a tablespoon of margarine and the same of smooth peanut butter, then beating in about a cup of sifted icing sugar, then adding a dash of milk to get it to a better consistency (no recipe, I made it up) and Wonderment! The stuff is A.Maz.Ing.


Did I mention it was about midnight at this point and I supposed to be at my new job at 8:45am the next morning? Since it was so late, I iced a single -still warm -cupcake, scoffed it, then did my teeth and went to bed. The icing I'll make again, but I'm not so sure about the red velvet cake.


The next morning I iced a few more of the cupcakes and took one to work with me (in my pink lunchbox) to eat with my coffee at morning tea (morning tea? More wonderment! I have never had a job which let me have a sit-down morning tea before.) The job, meanwhile, I think will be good once I get my head around everything. The site is huge, and there are hundreds and hundreds of plants for me to learn about and I only know about 50 of them so far, but so many beautiful green things around me and a lovely setting. It will be a lot of work, but worth it.

A series of mishaps

A whole ten days ago I posted that I had some penstemon and geranium cuttings waiting for me to pot them up. It has, as I mentioned, been a long ten days since then. Apart from the various illnesses doing the rounds of the family, there was also the part where I was walking home from work, after getting off the bus at 3am last Saturday night. One minute I'm calmly, but quickly, walking along (it was very cold, wet, dark, windy...), and then next thing I know I'm lying on the side of the road. In the mud. I'd stepped right on the edge of the asphalt, and my ankle gave way beneath me, tossing me over into the gutter: SPLAT. All very undignified. My ankle hurt; the palm of my hand hurt, and there were some furious embarrassed tears too (although, at 3am, it's not like anyone saw me.) And I'm then sitting there, ankle hurting, owwww, how am I going to get home now? Before my better-self piped up with, oh just get over it, stand up for Heaven's sake, can you walk on the ankle, or not? Staggering to my feet, I realised sheepishly that my ankle was not, in fact, broken, and I could limp the last 200m home, where once I got into the light and the warm I realised I was quite literally covered in mud, leaves and debris to my waist, and I even had mud in my eyebrows. In my eyebrows! Good work, if I do say so myself. The next day my ankle hardly hurt at all, my hand had barely a scratch, but my wrist was hurting and my whole knee had turned purple (and still is) which is ironic because I didn't even realise I'd banged it at the time.

Anyway. Moving on.

So, as I said, it was a bit windy that night. I discovered in the morning that apart from my purple knee, the wind had blown my cuttings off the table outside -where I'd left them because I was going to pot them up 'any minute now,' and smashed the glass all over the paving. Bugger.
I rescued what I could and put them back into some water (where they languished for another week).


During the week we went around to our little cottage and I pottered in the garden out the front, clipping roses, planting strawberries, planting my second persimmon, and also, as it transpired, doing a little impromptu pruning on one of my favourite correas by being careless with the hose, accidentally ripping off the entire leading branch. Feck. I guess that particular plant is destined to be even more of a ground cover than I had intended. I thought I might be able to save some of it somehow, so took it home and put it in a container of water by the sink. Look how big it was!


What's a girl-gardener to do? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. (An unfair judgement on lemons I always think; I like lemons particularly.) Or when you accidentally rip out half a correa, try to take as many cuttings from the poor soul as you can. Like so. Or not like so. This is not meant as instructions because I have very little clue, I'm just winging it really, but more of a record of 'What Katie Did Next.'

This is as far as I've gotten with my propagating for a week: filled pots. They've been waiting, and waiting... and waiting... for me to get my act together.


Then I clipped off as many usable correa twigs as I could and pulled off most of the leaves.


I trimmed them all off to the same sort of size and dipped the ends into the rooting powder.


Then I made a little forest of them in a pot. There may be too many in here, but then I'm assuming that most of them, if not all, will not strike.


While I was there, I finally got around to making cuttings of the penstemon and the geraniums too.


Like little ducks all in a row...


I'll update this one in a couple of months or so when I know if it worked or not.

May your working week pass quickly xx

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

Rewinding this on July 1st 2011, not because it's a funny post, because, let's face it, I'm not a funny writer, but because quite often in this gardening gig you need to have a sense of humour or you'd give up completely.

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

... our sweet potato, because, clearly, I've not yet got the hang of growing it!


The sweet potato (kumara) in the background is one we bought from our friendly neighbourhood vegetable wholesaler this afternoon. It was an especially big one, granted. I weighed it and it was 1010 grams. Then I weighed our minute harvest, which is from two plants, and in total the weighed a mere 118 grams.
But nothing is wasted: I scrubbed them clean, and they were tossed whole into the pot with a free range chicken, some kipflers, a lemon and big slug of verjuice, and they tasted so good, so very, very good, that I really, really wished they had done a little better. They were so much brighter and deeper in colour than our bought whopper, and so much more intensely flavoured.
I think the lesson here is that next time, I should do a little more reading and preparation before I plant them, rather than just chucking them in the ground and hoping for the best!