What a lovely weekend - despite being ill

I woke up on Saturday morning with a raging sore throat - great! Just what I needed when the family were going on a BBQ on Exmouth beach that evening with my husband's work colleagues. Still, I consumed lots of cold relief tablets and sore throat sweets and prepared to battle on. I'm glad I did, as I had one of the best nights out in a long time. I'm normally quite a shy person - that's why me doing this blog is a bit of radical thing for me - and normally on Steve's work occasions I tend to not really say anything, as I feel that a humble civil servant cannot possibly have anything interesting to say to a group of ecologists.  However, his colleagues are a nice gang of people and I think the 3 bottles of cider helped things along! Yes, I did get rather drunk - much to my childrens' embarrassment/amusement.!!

I woke up on Sunday with a slight headache - I blaming the cold and not a hangover!! After popping some pills I set to work on making a carrot cake with orange buttercream icing. My daughter Liana has been asking for a carrot cake for ages and after trawling the internet and not finding one that I really wanted to make, I came up with this one with is a combination of two different recipies - icing is courtesy of the Mary Berry Complete Cookbook but I substituted orange juice for her lemon juice.

Ingredients

225g self raising flour
1/2 tsp ground mixed spice
150g soft dark brown sugar
180g finely grated carrots
2 medium eggs
150ml sunflower oil
2tbsp milk
100g butter
225g icing sugar
juice of half a small orange
rind of small orange

Method

Heat oven to 180*C, 350*F, Gas mark 4

Grease and line 20 cm cake tin

Mix flour and mixed spice in a large bowl. Stir in sugar, grated carrots and some of the orange rind (reserve some for decoration).

Make a well in the centre of the ingredients and add eggs, oil and milk. Mix together well so no flour is visible.

Place mixture in cake tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until will risen and golden and a skewer is clean when inserted.

Leave to cool in tin for a few minutes, then turn out of tin, remove greaseproof paper and leave to cool completly on a metal rack.

To make the icing, mix half the icing sugar with the butter and whisk with electric mixer. Tip - cover the bowl with a tea towel whilst you do this or you could end up with more icing sugar on the worktop and yourself rather than the bowl, like I did!!. When mixed together, add the rest of the icing sugar and enough orange juice to get the required consistency.

Decorate the cake with icing and sprinkle with reserved orange rind.

Carrot and orange cake with orange icing

I also went on to make pot roasted chicken with sun-dried tomatoes, cinnamon and oregano served with orzo pasta from the Rick Stein Mediteranean Escapes book for our evening meal. I've attached a photo here - excuse the presentation. It did taste a lot nicer than it looks!!

I also managed to get a lot of stitching time in. I'm currently working on Bothy Threads Gorguss "The Collector". I'm on the final bits of back stitching in her hair with the wording and button still to do. I'm finding it difficult using the metallic thread as it's the first time I've really used it. I did invest in some Thread Heaven as I'd heard that is very useful but I'm still getting the hang of it. I'm hoping to finish her today and will post my completed picture on here later. After that, I want to make her into a cushion - but that's another story and I haven't a clue how to do that. Thanks heavens for the internet!!