Limeade for a mini friend!

I've got the refreshing homemade limeade now all I need is some sun & hot weather to go with it!

The wonderful Phil at glassscraft made the little carafes & glasses for me & all I did was make the rustic wooden tables with the limes & lemon on & fill the carafes & glasses! Makes me want to have the real thing!

Freshly foraged mushrooms....

I'm still away in London after a flying visit to see 2 of my kids.....managing to fit in a quick, but expensive visit to KDF on saturday as a buyer & not a seller this time! It was good to take a look at all the fabulous works of art displayed there & to meet up with some mini making friends! I came away with a fabulously different little character from Jain at Giddy Kipper dols & when I get home & sorted out I'll be showing her off...I have great plans for her...now all I need is the time to put the plan together.... In the meantime, before I left for London I managed to finish a little barrel of foraged 'shrooms & here they are!

Who can't help but love fresh rhubarb?

About the only good thing about this cold, grey & miserable weather we are suffering in UK for the past couple of months is that my rhubarb has never looked (or tasted) better than it does this year! It seems to be thriving in this miserable weather!.....are we ever going to have some warmth...I'm seriously beginning to think that we will never get summer here this year!

You know by now that I like to make a mini of my food faves of the moment so here's one of the little baskets that I made in the quiet moments of "new baby" duties filled with freshly picked rhubarb..although I have to say that the leaves on my real rhubarb are 3 times the size of the mini variety!

At the same time, I'm still going through a craving for cheese...any cheese, at any time! Last night's offering to my craving was a delicious baked Camembert &....yes, you guessed it...I made one in mini too....:-)

A wedding cake for a cheese lover!

Sometimes it's really good to make something that isn't a sweet or pretty cake & as I am a fanatical cheese lover.....although sadly, due to a severe allergic reaction to blue cheese, I can no longer eat it, even though I'd love to, I decided to make a cheese tower. Now I have done these before, but this time I decided that the end result would be a cheese tower wedding cake, lavishly decorated with grapes, apple slices & tomatoes.....

I managed to get it finished & photographed before I headed out to get the grass cut, as for one day it has actually stopped raining....the weather here is enough to make me want to shoot myself...the forecast for tomorrow is yet more heavy rain & gale force NE winds..worse than mid winter & it's late April...where on earth is the sun! I blame our wonderful government...they declare "drought" & place a hosepipe ban on the South of England & since then it's never stopped raining! Maybe I should shoot them instead.......

I'm thinking about summer arriving!

I am so sick of the constant cold & rain that we are experiencing here in the North East of England that I've been trying to cheer myself up by pretending that the soft fruit will be ripening soon.....at the minute what blossom there is is in grave danger of being frozen!
So here's my little bit of summer in case we don't actually get a summer at all!

Tomatoes!

It's been a while since I got to my blog.....I'm not a good blogger at all, but in my defense, since I got back from "the desert" I've had my oldest daughter & her family here for the Easter break!
Now that they've gone home & the house is mucked out & back to normal..(it's too quiet now!)I'm slowly getting back down to some "work"!

Today it's been tomatoes!

Hopefully it won't be as long before the next post.......

"New Baby Duty" baskets!!

It just shows what you can do in between cooking, stocking freezers & helping a new mum with her new baby! There is nothing nicer than sitting in the lovely hot sun early in the morning while everyone is still in bed & weaving a few baskets!
I can't believe that in the 3 weeks I was there I actually managed to weave 15!

Hopefully I'll get back to work soon as I have a few outstanding orders to finish that had to be put to one side to fly out to the "desert" but that's more of a struggle than I had first thought as I'm still shackled to the cooker as of course it's the Easter holidays & my oldest daughter, her husband & 3 kids are here for 10 days!