It has taken me a while to make a vegan cake recipe worth sharing. What I needed was to learn about what the ingredients actually do in combination with each other to make cake, and also to ignore recipes which try to replicate the 'egginess' of traditional cake. Anyway, for my vegan daughter's 16th birthday, I think I finally cracked it. She had specific requirements: One layer, chocolate and ginger, not too sweet, not too much icing. I … [Read more...]
A snowy day
We don't often get snow here in the Preseli Hills, so it's a bit of a treat for me. I'll never get over the childlike excitement of waking up, opening the curtains and seeing fluffy white flakes falling from the sky Today we've had just a few inches - enough to be pretty, but not enough to cause major disruption. The minor roads are a little tricky but the main roads are clear so it didn't stop my daughters getting to school and I was still … [Read more...]
Making hay and electricity while the sun shines
We're rather basking in an Indian summer here in the Preseli Hills. We've made hay for the first time in years; usually we make haylage which doesn't need nearly so much drying and is plastic wrapped to protect it from the damp while curing and preserving the grass. But that plastic wrap brings its own disposal problems - all we can do is store it in the hope that one day we'll have enough for the recyclers to collect. Not using it at all … [Read more...]