Sketchbooks and Cookbooks

I was delighted to be the "winner" of some art stuff from Gina's giveaway last week ...........

I love the brilliant clear colour of the Koh-I-Noor dyes and have decided to join in her colour sketchbook challenge "Close to Home".  Having spent the last week dithering about a starting point (now decided but will save that for the next post) I've chosen the colour green.  I was rather concerned about the limits of one colour for me personally so green fits nicely.  Both the lime and jade in the dyes are very pretty plus I can play around with yellows and blues and still have green!


Unfortunately the cling film (Morrisons) didn't have enough "cling" (sheets 2 and 3) but luckily I had already used a sheet of plastic canvas weighted down onto the wet paint for sheet 4 to give a textural effect .......................

The second book in my cookbook challenge is "The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook".  The Key Lime pie with 2 cans of condensed milk is very, very sweet ............. especially when it has a meringue topping!  I didn't actually make it but I did have a hand in deciding that the filling needed a longer cooking time than specified:

Some other things from the book (not all this week lol) ............. Pineapple and Coconut cupcakes (greatly reducing the butter content for the frosting):

Chocolate cookies ................

Rocky Mess Road .................

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With regards to the last post, yes, the Brownies could have done with a little less cooking.  I did check them at 27 mins but wasn't too sure so left them for 35 (35-45 recommended I think) plus I used silicon bakeware so they were a little drier at the edges.  I have a Nigella recipe so will have a go at that one some day too.
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Cook Book Challenge 1

A non stitching post!

Am seriously running out of cookbook space ................ again and have challenged myself to go through them, in the order they appear on the shelf, and sort out what we really want to keep whilst choosing a recipe to cook from each one.  First on the top shelf is Rachel Allen's "Food for Living" which has never been used.  I find Brownies generally rather dry and not very appealing but these, overloaded with chocolate and raspberries, promised to be "fudgy" so had to be trialled.

They're not as dry as most but with 200g dark chocolate, 225g white chocolate and a punnet of raspberries are not cheap!  The pouring of melted white chocolate over looks messy but could be an idea for a festive treat with a bit more care ............... maybe even substituting canned pitted black cherries for the raspberries.
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