aaaaaaaah ;________________;

thank you all so, so much; I cannot even; I-- thank you. Thank you. Poems & individual thanks to come (though I am struggling to match up some of your names-as-reported-to-me with names-I-know-you-as).

I do not the words, at least not right now. <333

ten good things//{we speak the same language/but I never understood your poetry}

1. Good Greek yoghurt. Today it has made me very happy in combination with a. cheap tinned peaches and b. honey-and-apple cake. (Actually, I bet you'd like a recipe, wouldn't you? One recipe coming up.)

2. I made a proper overelaborate dinner, by which I mean "pizza and chips from scratch" (although I got the breadmaker and the mier between them to deal with the dough; on the upside, I failed hideously at the first attempt at dough and mostly fixed it. Om nom food. Also I jarred up the remainders of this batch of Apfelmuss!

3. SUCH HOUSE-TIDYING. Black waste all bagged up and deposited at the top of the stairs (this is how waste here), having done the recycling yesterday; I did MANY washing up; and I swept my floor. Consequently I feel much better. Also I moved all my crap back out of the living room, heh.

4. I REORGANISED MY E-READER. It lost all the folders/collections, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, and today I sorted it out (including doing some recategorisation such that all the Woolf and JKJ is now in its own folder of Unread Classics (along with Dante's Inferno etc etc).

5. Curled up with dinner and watched one of my favourite episodes of Elementary with my housemate! And then I had a feeling everywhere and did a cry.

6. And now we are curled up with some of my white noise on in the background (it is beach waves, which I adore not least because background sound of waves is what you get in The Mouldering Ancestral Pile).

7. I was curt and to-the-point with several people being Wrong On The Internet today (why do I read facebook whyyyyyyyy) but I stopped short of actually being rude, so. (At least by my own metrics! Which are the ones I care about here.)

8. Big shopping delivery yesterday involved acquiring enough flour etc to last us most of another quarter, and also involved me making the internet send me 6 litres of my current favourite fruit juice only available from a slightly inconvenient shop, so that is nice and I am working my way through it with gusto.

9. I have spent a fair bit of time in the cemetery over the road over the past few days, and am beginning to contemplate going and taking a bunch of photos (to go with my planned set of pictures of the various wrought-iron railings along my street) - in particular there's one with an astonishing violin on it (for some poor bastard who died at the age of 32, whose band - he was a bandmaster - clearly all chipped in to get him A Proper Memorial).

10. It feels an awful lot like I am going to sleep well tonight, and it will be all the better for having made there be Magical Morning Bread. :-)

[food] Honey-and-apple cake

( On reflection, the image containing a knife should probably be behind a cut tag. )

A week or so ago, Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for apple-honey cake. Oooh, I thought, that looks interesting, and left it open in tabs, in the knowledge that I had a sack of windfalls I'd dragged here from home that wanted et.

There came a point at which I felt like making cake.

"... wait," I went, "this wants me to separate out the eggs that is bullshit I can't be having with generating that much washing up." So instead I made my currently-standard honey cake and dolloped a chunked apple over the top of it and lo, it was good.

My standard recipe is very lightly adapted from this King Arthur Flour recipe.

Ingredients
170g butter (room temperature)
340g honey
4 large eggs
57g yoghurt or (if you're feeling enthusiastic) sour cream
140g brown flour
100g white flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Some Apples (I used one large windfall, but supermarket sizes are more standardised)

Method
Preheat oven to ~180degC/GM4/325F.

Mix together butter, honey, eggs.

Add flours, salt, baking soda.

Add yoghurt. (You definitely want a yoghurt with some bite for this. We normally have Greek in the house and consequently normally I end up using Greek.)

Turn your nice gloopy mix into a cake tin. I use a loaf tin, and my loaf tin is silicone, which means I don't tend to bother greasing+flouring it, but you can do the thing if you like! Also you can use baking parchment if you like. Again, I don't... normally bother.

Apple! The apple wants to be peeled and chunked, in this instance, unless you wanna do fancy stuff per SK. If you cut it as instructed you get a nice star-shape (per the image above) and also maximum apple-efficiency, just saying. Get a nice dense covering over the top of the wossname, pop it in the oven, and In A Bit There Will Be Cake. Which, I am delighted to report, goes really very well with some more of the yoghurt (or soured cream). This one wants to be baked for abouuuuuuut 45 minutes but honestly I am still getting the hang of my oven and tend to end up covering cake with a bit of foil and turning the temperature down to get it to finish up without burning the top, after about half an hour or so, but probably your oven is better behaved!

Anyway. Yes. Then there is cake and it gets rapidly inhaled. This kept on the side for four days and might've lasted longer except we et it all.