Any Excuse for Cake

I'm not what you'd call keen on the Royals but the Nuptials are as good a reason as any to make Donna Hay's Earl Grey Tea Cake.

• I cup chopped fresh dates
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 3/4 cup brewed earl grey tea
• 2 apples, peeled and grated
• 1 1/4 cups self-raising flour, sifted
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 150 g butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 eggs

1. 1 Preheat oven to 160°C.
2. 2 Place the dates, bicarbonate of soda and tea in a bowl and set aside for 10 minutes.
3. 3 Using a hand-held blender, blend the date mixture until smooth. Set aside.
4. 4 Place the apple, flour and sugar in a bowl and mix to combine.
5. 5 Add the butter, vanilla, eggs and date mixture and mix well to combine.
6. 6 Spoon into a lightly-greased 2.5 litre capacity (10 cup) loaf tin and bake for 45 -55 minutes, or until cooked when tested with a skewer.

     7 Allow to cool in tin for 10 minutes before turning out on to a wire tack to cool completely.

I suppose you could serve this with a cup of Earl Grey, but really, I'd much rather you balanced this out with something more aligned with the workers, like a nice pot of Yorkshire tea. 

If you'd like to play an amusing game whilst waiting for the loaf to cook, you could create your Royal name. Mine is the rather august sounding Lady Mary Patch-Magowar.


Take a grandparent's first name, add the name of your first pet double barreled with the name of the street you grew up on. Plonk a Lord or Lady in front of it.

And I'm not sure why the ingredients are linked. In case you've never come across butter before, I suppose. Or eggs. I'm on a strict timer system these days so I don't have time to do anything about it.

Also, if anyone thinks we live in a rarefied atmosphere of literature and tea cake, consider this: my daughter just said "Dictionaries suck."

First Day Back - 2nd Term, 2nd Grade

Snowy was agitating for another two days holiday. "It doesn't make any sense to start school on a Thursday." So I was kind and let him do school-lite today.

10.00 - I was busy with the girls before this and Snowy was busy drawing Mario Worlds. At 10 we sat down at the kitchen table and worked on the two and ten times tables.

10.30 - Snowy read me a chapter from his new Aussie Nibbles book Fast Grandma. I'm trying not to jump in so much and give him time to figure out unfamiliar words.

10.45 - Lucy and I spent a ( futile ) minute telling Snowy how lucky he is to have a new handwriting book! He completed a page of downstroke revision. All that pencil holding correction over the last year has worked - he corrects his own pencil hold now.

11.15 - He had a bit of a break and I had time between working with the girls to read a chapter aloud from one of our nature study books, The Story of Kurri Kurri the Kookaburra by Leslie Rees. Much hilarity around my kookaburra impersonation.

Back to drawing Mario Worlds.

1.30 - I read Snowy a Nanny Piggins chapter while he practiced indoor bowling on my bed. ( It was pouring outside and there was a little pent up energy in the house.) We're between read-alouds. We've finally finished the Borrower books, all five of which Snowy insisted I read in a row. I even dream I'm a borrower sometimes.

2.30 - I suggested a game of draughts. We played. Snowy won.

Back to making Lego Mario Worlds...

What he didn't do..but will do come Monday.
*phonics lesson
* Kurri Kurri narration
* extra subject - this term he's doing maps/science/Shakespeare/art - one subject per day.

* go for a walk or spend time outdoors - if he gets completely stir crazy we'll go out anyway.

A completely adequate amount of work for a 7yr old. In my opinion!

At 4.00 the weather cleared and we went for our walk.  The oval had turned into a swamp and we stopped for a while to watch the ibis feeding, the long curve of their beaks digging into the wet ground.  One ibis bathed in the water. I remembered that we'd spent some time this morning watching a pigeon on our fence grooming itself, all ruffled seriousness.  The oval is a magical place; yesterday we saw a full, double rainbow - the second in as many weeks. I like to walk there and feel the day gather meaning to itself.

The Brontes Vs The Russians

If pre-war, sisterly imagination is your thing – and you have a high tolerance for the idea of the Brontes as rather cantankerous ghosts – The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson is the book for you.

She had me on the first page, Miss Ferguson did.

A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, “Do you like reading ?” which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread – absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation.

And by the end of chapter one I was completely sold.

Three years ago I was proposed to. I couldn’t accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes.

This is the sort of deceptively light whimsy that cheers and consoles and celebrates the imagination all at once. Though it’s probably a sign of my shallowness that I gobbled this up in an hour or two, whereas Summer in Baden-Baden A Novel by Leonid Typkin has been in the house for at least a week and  I haven’t managed to finish the first, never-ending sentence yet. I was mildly interested in finding out that Typkin was a published author for a mere seven days before he died. And I have a theory – already! On less than half a page of reading! – about Typkin’s use of the dash. Still, my advice would be to go for the Brontes and Woolworths makes a nice change from the moors.

Two facts - There is no clip art online for "Gloomy Russian Gentleman". 
The New York Times calls Summer 'Extraordinary!'Indeed!

14 Days in the (Virtual) Wilderness

And what did I discover ? That being screen-free means more time to clean the house and more time to read. Hardly a revelation! And not difficult at all.

The internet is an odd place, intimate and impersonal at once. It’s useful, yet unsettling. A place that requires you to wonder just how connected you really are to those you are connecting with.

I didn’t miss the wondering. I didn’t miss the sense of uninterrupted life that being screen-free gave me. Days where the time for work and for leisure were unrushed and adequate. I didn’t miss sitting at the computer with my back to the room, to the living being done in the room. I didn’t miss the multiple and fragmented conversations I was used to holding in my head from the last post, to the next thread.

I know that some people manage it well, transitioning easily from screen to life and back. Some of us find abstinence an easier approach.

Yet in all the real-life gaps between conversations with friends and neighbours and sisters and children – the gaps where there was time to clean the grubby kitchen doors or make bread days in a row or lie on the bed and read and read – there was a missing. An absence of mind speaking to mind, mediated by the keyboard and the screen. Enough of a missing to make me return to this odd, disembodied world.

With changes. A fortnight was long enough to see that. To realise that blogging can be done off-line. And that reading and conversing can be done after the day’s living is done. That there is meaning to a weekly Sabbath, even for a non-believer. That email has no power over me! Things to make it easier to move between this world and that.

It's all in the name...

Until after the Big April Chocolate Festival! I really used to fret about
Easter- we weren't celebrating it for religious reasons, it isn't springtime here and my youngest doesn't even believe in the Easter Bunny. ( That last bit is a good thing. It makes shopping for Easter eggs easier and I can give them to my boy to hide which means I don't eat them all before Easter and have to return to the shops to buy them all over again.)


Once I renamed Easter as the Big April Chocolate Festival, however, my angst ceased and all has been  well since  in our (permanently) cocoa-scented home. The children and I are going on holiday to pass the time until BACF Sunday. And when we get back, I'm going to explore the virtuous world of Screen Free Week.

So I'll be back once I've satisfied myself that I'm not actually addicted to the internet - ha! - and as soon as we're out of our chocolate-induced comas. Have yourselves a sweet BACF!!!

Drill for Skill

Maths Trainer

Thanks for the link Helena! This is the mathematical equivalent of hiding vegies in the spaghetti sauce.
Me: Hey, would you like to play this game on the computer ?
Snowy: YES!!! Can I do it for 10 minutes ?
Afterwards
Snowy: Can I play it for half an hour next time ? I need to beat my score.
Me: YES!!!

Lovely Helena. Lovely computer. Lovely Math Trainer.

Today

Arwen drawing a scene from The Fellowship of The Ring.

Snowy experimenting with making mountain streams and rivers.

Lucy knitting her second square for this year's Wrapped With Love blanket.

Interestingly

Chris has to introduce David Vann at an event next week.
Oh, the things we must do to earn our daily bread!

The London Review of Books has a very impressive review of Caribou Island. Apparently.

The Good, The Bad and The ( Slightly ) Shameful

Barbara Pym is good. I borrowed Jane and Prudence, her 1953 novel of post-war British society, because the women on the cover were wearing lovely frocks, one rose and the other emerald green.  Often called a modern day Austen, Pym's characters are wiser and sadder than an Emma or an Elizabeth. Jane, an impractical, dowdy and well educated clergyman's wife who sets out  to play matchmaker to Prudence, her glamourous friend -  Jane's former student, now a 'spinster' engaged in various unsatisfactory love affairs - reflects upon poetry, village life and the nature of men. And women.  A comedy of manners with an undertone of cynicism. The clothes in the novel are wonderful too. It was really rather delicious.

Caribou Island by David Vann was not. It's about an idiot husband whose wife has a terrible headache and they build a cabin out on a freezing cold, isolated island and we gradually find out he's a bastard and she's unhinged and she ends up shooting him with a bow and arrow before hanging herself. Depressingly, she still has her headache when she dies. And in between their adult children have unsatisfactory relationships. There is quite a lot of hype over this novel but it just isn't very good. In my humble opinion, for which I'm sure David Vann cares not a fig!

I'm editing this to add a little more weight to my dislike of this book. Besides an overwrought plot and unbelievable characters, it's very clumsily structured. Characters don't develop over the novel. There are apostrophes in the wrong place. It's meant to be a novel of landscape but I could form no picture at all of the town, the island, the cabin. It reads like a first draft, the kind you'd suggest was put away in a drawer for a year or two.  It's clear that this book was published because Vann's first book sold well and Penguin think they can move this one on the basis of the first. I don't have anything against Mr Vann ( although I'm glad he wasn't my creative writing teacher ) but truly, the Emperor here has no clothes.

Now to the shameful...which of course was the most enjoyable. Isn't that always the way ?  Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris is about Harper Connelly, a lightening  strike survivor left with the uncanny ability to find dead people. She and her stepbrother Tolliver make a business this way and, asked to find a missing eleven year old girl, they become caught up in all sorts of criminal and murderous high jinks. Charlaine Harris makes me think of a CWA lady making scones. It's all in the light hand.  I read her Aurora Teagarden books over the summer and she does a lovely job of the almost Christie-like mystery. Here, it's all a bit darker - and there's a ghost, which was a bit much even for me...almost.

Feathers

Snowy's collection - proof that we do spend some time outdoors!

Two of Lucy's sketches.