Last post of November!

Greetings from the cat.

Ten minutes until December. Oh dear, I appear to have mislaid a month or six..

I do have a proper sensible what-we-did-on-Saturday post to do but it requires a daylight photo, so tomorrow maybe, and I just wanted to do another post in November so that I don't feel too much like an intermittent blogger. Which I am of course, but you know, good intentions and all that!

Also St.Andrews Day - I feel I should post on St. Andrews Day, having enjoyed the Google doodle and everything, even if I'm only posting a picture of my Scottish cat.

forward planning

The PTA Christmas Fair (or Fayre, I dunno) and the Christmas disco are coming up and I'm baking for both. So being quite incredibly organised, I've actually planned what I'm baking and I've done a trial run of one of them. Seems implausible doesn't it?

Pinterest has been very useful in getting fairy cake/cupcake decoration ideas. I'm a fan of the chocolate orange anyway, so when I saw pictures of chocolate orange cupcakes, well... Drool. I had a rummage through my various recipe books and found a recipe for chocolate fairy cakes - though as always it was a weird quantity, enough for 16. I've only ever seen tins for 12 ever, in my whole life. Mind you, it's better than the recipe I used for the Hallowe'en cupcakes which said something random like 'makes 27'. 

Miss M and I threw together a batch at the weekend, iced them with *blush* ready-made 'frosting' (butter icing in this case as far as I can tell) and topped with Chocolate Orange Minis. Well, most of them - Miss M doesn't like chocolate oranges, weird kid, so she had them without the segment. The Boy has had a cake in his packed lunch every day so far this week, but there are, ahem, only a couple left now. The ready-made frosting feels like a total cheat but it goes on so easily and is much tastier than I thought it would be, so I'm happy with it. Thumbs up from all!

I'd like to try them with orange essence in the cake mix but I fear Miss M would disapprove. Oh well, two batches, eh?

My other plan is to make rainbow cupcakes, so we'll need to give those a trial run too. Miss M likes playing with food colouring so I'm sure it'll all go swimmingly. Maybe.

lurching into winter

It snowed on Friday night. The snow didn't last beyond Saturday evening but it proved that autumn has definitely gone. It had lingered longer than usual really, being quite a dry and mild autumn, but we had gales last week and suddenly the trees are bare. So these pictures are my final fling of autumn, all taken in mid-October when we were visiting my parents.

 Looking at them now I'm realising how much warmth is in them!

I'm having a bit of trouble blogging because my knitting mojo is AWOL and I'm feeling essentially boring - how sad is that? I want to knit but I want it to be something soothing and easy. I have wool, I have needles, but can't make up my mind about a pattern!  As for being boring, well, I've been studying. Bit behind at the moment but life happens sometimes! I did my first assignment for this course a couple of weeks ago and got 84% for it which was a relief as this course is quite a step up from the one I did last year and it was all feeling a bit alarming. The first assignment is always an emotional hurdle I think.

I'd better stop now - Cat 1 is knocking things over, a sure sign that it's time the cats were fed and that I go to bed! I'll try to be (even) more fascinating in the next post.