The great escape

Last Christmas the English department at Mum’s school gave her a red amaryllis, which she brought home. There was no suitable setting for it in her library and one of her assistants tasked Dad with taking care of it. Mum’s not the one to whom you should entrust your pot plants while you go on [...]

Cupcakes

This is another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The brownies were great, but these chocolate and hazelnut cupcakes are marriage material. They’re also a doddle to make: even the fiddly bit turned out to not be fiddly.
You will need:
100g plain flour
20g cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
40g butter, at room [...]

Crowded monkeys

This is how the monkey nuts look this morning: as if they’d like to be repotted. But repotting involves going outside (which is something I managed to avoid completely between Boxing Day and Suzy’s birthday on 16th January) and getting cold and grubby. So you see why I didn’t repot them last weekend as planned. [...]

Jazz Hands Jr.

The second peanut made an appearance as soon as I shamed it on the electric internet. It’s like I Maytagged it or something.
Though the first plant is growing so fast that I suppose that there’s always the possibility it’s going to grow teeth and eat its neighbour. And then me.

Jazz hands!

One monkey nut continues apace. The other, not so much. I guess we’ll call that one compost.

Bowling à la Suzy

Approach 1:
Hold the ball high above your head, putting the fear of God into those behind you, before throwing it down the lane with great venom. The ball should make a satisfying, loud SMACK as it hits the floor with force, so as to underscore your great might.

Approach 2:
At the urging of your (cowering) friends, [...]

Nuts, monkey and otherwise

One of the peanuts I planted has now germinated, pinging above the soil, split nut and all. I spent the first day or two trying to cover it up again with the compost, before finally confirming that it was ok, it was meant to do that. Like all patient gardeners, I’ve also dug about in [...]