DANISH APPLE CAKE

A friend brought me a carrier bag of apples which weren't good enough to wrap and store so it's now a case of using them as quickly as possible. Blackbirds will have them if they aren't suitable for cooking use.
I found this recipe which, from the annotation, I last made in 2003; the trouble is that living on my own I now have to eat the whole pud! Ain't that sad! The recipe comes from 'The WI book of Cakes' which I've had for years and written comments in as well.
I peeled and cored then stewed the apples down to a pulp, leaving the result to drip through a colander since I don't have a sieve any more - a tea strainer's too small...
For the cake mix it's 8 oz flour, 4 oz each marg and (they say) soft brown sugar plus an egg.
Melt the marg and mix with the sugar, add the lightly beaten egg and mix well. Stir in the flour.
Spread 2/3rds of the mix on the bottom of the tin/container then add the apples plus a handful of dried fruit, sultanas in this case.It doesn't matter if the apples are still steaming. Plop the remainder of the mix over the top where it will spread during cooking to cover the apple layer.
The oven needs preheating to 180C, Mark 4, well, I did 3 1/2 and it was OK. Takes 45 mins to cook.Eat and enjoy.

The cores and peelings went into a plastic bag to go down to the stables for the chickens. Bella, the dog, thought I'd gone to play with her and Tig, the cat, sat watching through half closed eyes. She looks just like Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat. Helen had gone riding on one of her horses and the other two in the field were whinnying all the time. Stuart is building a shed, very slowly...and it was cold!
 

MUG MAT

I wrote a blog last night but it disappeared...Having had a day of little things going awry I decided to leave it until this morning to have another go. Things are still going wrong...Ho hum.

I was looking on different patchworking sites and found a piece about Mug Mats, large enough to take a mug and a couple of biscuits. It was 6" x 10" but mine's larger at 6" x 12" because I've used two squares I made earlier, just like Blue Peter... It was meant to be a practise for machine quilting with the two reels of machine quilting cotton bought to scribble-quilt the Triangles quilt I made for me, so not too much of a problem if it's untidy. (More about that later!)

I thought this scribble looked a little bit like something from the Zodiac...

I like this material as it has gold in it, too.

After I'd taken the photo of the mat I realised that I'd not made a very good job of the bottom edge, so this morning, in the daylight, I unpicked about half of the edge and resewed it so it looks better now. Just being lazy and not taking another photo...

It's still tending to be a Sod's Law day- having done Must Do jobs before I went out I decided just to start the quilting on the quilt, having unblocked the jammed bobbin from last night - after about 3 stitches - and was sailing along, uneven stitches but what the heck, I was machine quilting. It's a bit like learning to hand quilt tidily, which I can do. I must have pulled the material too hard and the needle broke so I went out instead.

Called on a friend to take her some Excel How To sheets and as I left there were masses of starlings in a large tree outside her home, including others in an apple tree making a great noise as they pecked their way through the bonus of apples. I called to her to wait to pick up some windfalls for me but she didn't hear so the starlings left. Damn! There was my blog for today...