Sunday 14th March - Tea cosy day and Polish Cake

 Some people might have thought this was Mothering Sunday - which it was. Or someone in particular's birthday. Which it was.

Both of these occasions were celebrated in the morning with breakfast in bed - I brought it up as a birthday treat, we both enjoyed it as our respective treats.

Both occasions were celebrated with presents and card, and later in the evening by a zoom call with the offsprings. Excellent!

But, in the afternoon, I darned in the half dozen remaining tails of yarn still straggling out of the back of the tea cosy, made two lines of stitching either side of the 'cut here line', and then did the actual for real first time ever 'cut along the line'.

I folded back the flaps and stitched them down (not my best stitching, sadly) and - hey presto - a tea cosy.

There are no pictures of the process because I was so involved in what I was doing that I forgot to take any. It was less of a 'hey presto'  and more of a 'hey adagio' thing - it took most of an episode of 'Morse'.

The final instructions are to 'block' the tea cosy, which means wash it and set it to dry over a domed bowl. The colours have significantly improved with washing - the sort of dusty pink, dusty fawn and dusty blue shades of the ancient yarn (unravelled from an old sweater by my godmother in an mistaken act of thriftiness) were those muted colours because they were - dusty. Or, to be truthful, a bit dirty.

You might be able to make out my six-cup brown teapot, (perched on top of another bowl to get the required height) acting as the 'domed bowl'. The cosy is far too big for it - I might give it to the church kitchen for one of their 'institutional' size teapots.

This teapot, my two-cup size, is the one that needs a tea cosy.

I have cast on the 144 stitches of finer, real Shetland yarn from the Shetland Isles (2 ply instead of 4 ply) on smaller needles (3mm instead of 4mm) and am hoping for the best.

No other news, apart from this;

Polish Cake also called Biscuit Cake or Fridge Cake

(I don't know if this is Polish as 'from Poland' or polish as in 'gets polished off very quickly')

Melt together 4 oz butter, 1 1/2 oz cocoa powder, 2 oz caster sugar, 1 heaped tablespoon golden syrup.

Crush 8 oz rich tea biscuits into smallish pieces but not into powder. 

Stir the biscuits into the gloop and mix well so that all of every biscuit is covered.

Press firmly into an 8 inch round tin or equivalent 

Melt 4 oz plain chocolate (100 grams is fine, I found) and cover the top of the biscuit mix

Chill in the fridge, serve in small squares, no more than an inch across.

My mother used to make this on special occasions - I can't think why it was thought to be so extravagant and special because the ingredients are not all that expensive, and it is one of the easiest things to make. I used left over speculaas biscuits which gave this a wonderful flavour, a little like the lebbuchen we didn't manage to buy at Christmas time.

The batch I made last week was gone before the weekend, so we had to make do with Birthday Chocolates (don't be sad for us, they were very, very good). Once I have finished typing this post I'm going to use up some more of the speculaas biscuits - it was a very big packet!