Coffee and Walnut Cake

Its seems such a long time since I last posted on my blog, so here I am again. I've just baked this coffee and walnut cake, done all the washing up, so when Mr S walks in after work, and finds me cosied up with the laptop, we shall be ready for a nice cup of tea, cake and a chat.

For the recipe I revisited my old three volume Delia Smith's Cookery Course. Recently I have felt that my sponges could be improved and went back to basics, reading all her blurb. The oven temperature at Gas Mark 3, seems to have been the answer, rather than No 4. I warmed the walnuts for 5 mins in the oven, whilst it was heating up, before chopping up, to bring out the flavour of the walnuts. The butter cream was from Good Housekeeping, again a very old copy, but used a smaller quantity.


I've had a busy couple of weeks. All my own doing really, and most of it fun, but it has meant that some of my routine activities have been placed on the back burner for now. One thing that I have been missing is going to a knitting group on Tuesdays. I have missed my friends, and hope to start again after next week.

One of the reasons I didn't do one week when I could just about have done so, is that my only knitting at the moment is a pair of socks for David called Jeweled Steps, using Cat Borthdhi's Master Numbers System, and yes it does work. Because I have to keep referring to my magic numbers and also the pattern, which I have slightly modified, it is not the sort of knitting to sit and chat with.

Normally I try to have only one or at the most two projects on the go, and I like to complete projects. However I was flicking through the Spring 2009 copy of Interweave Knits, and found Vicki Squares article: Start as Many New Projects as you can, got me thinking. I'm not going to follow exactly in her footsteps, but I have now realised that with a variety of current projects, say three of different types, there will always be one that suits the situation: easy knitting, challenging knitting, go faster knitting etc.