Boxer the Bear

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Tríona

As you may know, I’m a crocheter at heart. Since I learned to crochet, I essentially gave up knitting and can’t go back. However, I’ve taken to machine knitting as a way to still knit without the fiddly hassle….

I was recently given a Bond Classic knitting machine and have been making squares and handbags on it. I got it into my head that I’d like to make a teddy bear, but struggled to find patterns online, so I came up with one. As both sides of the bear need to be the same, I have actually documented this pattern and will reproduce it below for future reference.

There are a few modifications that could be made, like making the body shorter and a bit narrower. The ears are a particular puzzle. They could be made separately but I’m lazy like that. The head was the original pattern for the body, but I figured it was a bit small given the size of the legs I had made!

Boxer sitting pretty on the laptop. His nose was broken in a boxing match…

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A Tunisian Sampler

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Tríona

Being in no fit state to bake anything today or even ramble about science, I sat on the couch experimenting with some Tunisian Crochet. In Tunisian crochet, you pick up a row of stitches on to your (long) crochet hook and then cast them all off on the reverse pass of the row. By varying how you pick up the stitches, you can get a very different look.

Updated sampler pic

: The product of my slow Sunday afternoon

Unfortunately, due to the experimental nature of the work and the fact that I only know the names of two stitch types (plain and purl), I’m at a loss as to the names of the other stitch variants (if indeed they have names). So, I’m asking anyone who might know the name of the various stitches to let me know what they are, thanks!

For those of you who don’t know about Tunisian (or Afghan) crochet at all, it’s a halfway between knitting and crochet and yet completely different to both. It’s an interesting one to learn, as you can get some unusual pieces from it. The internet has a wealth of resources if you’re looking to learn, or better yet, get some hands-on tutoring from your local yarn shop or hackerspace (Dublin folks can find me at craftnight in Tog).

edit: Thanks to @undermeoxter for some corrections

My first coffee and walnut cake

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Tríona

I’ve been meaning to get around to making coffee and walnut cake for years, and what better excuse to make a big decorated cake than a party! So, today, I made one, finally! Taking inspiration from Darina (did I mention how much I love the Ballymalloe Cookery Course book?), I added walnuts to the basic coffee cake recipe and doubled the buttercream quantity so there’d be some to go on the top.

The cake speaks for itself. In the background: a lemon (we know I love lemon), an aeropress (for making coffee in college), and my favourite coffee tin (it has the sleaziest coffee bean on the back, I must show you some time).

In the unlikely event that you don’t like walnuts, you can leave them out. In the more probable event that you do, buy more than you need for the recipe, I find other halves are inclined to start gobbling the nuts before you realise.

The original recipe called for irel, which is a coffee essence sort of product. I think it’s a sort of chicory/coffee syrup that you can use for cooking or making hot drinks with. Instead I used some strong coffee and misused my mokka pot to make it. I half filled the water resevoir and filled the coffee part as normal, giving a shorter stronger coffee (this is not how you’re normally supposed to use them). I poured the coffee over ice into a jug when it was done and put it in the fridge to cool completely. I had some leftover coffee after the cake, so I stirred in some milk for a lovely iced coffee treat. (I love coffee, in case you didn’t know this ).

225g butter
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
225g self-raising flour
6 dessert spoons strong coffee (you could probably substitute in instant or irel if you prefer)
100g of walnut halves (keep the 8 best looking halves for the top of the cake, and roughly chop/crush the remainder)

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line two 20cm cake tins (a bit of butter under the baking paper helps to keep it in place.

Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Then beat in the eggs one by one, beat them thoroughly, the first one is the hardest. Add the (sifted) flour and mix well. Add the coffee and walnut pieces and then divide the mixture between the two tins. Bake for 30 minutes until the cakes are firm and the sides start to come away from the edges of the tin.

Turn out on to a wire and remove the baking paper and then you can flip them over if you don’t want to have lines on the cake. Wait until they’re cool before you begin to ice them.

125g butter
250g icing sugar
4 tsp instant coffee in 1 tsp of hot water (I know, the shame of having a jar of instant, had to buy my first jar in years just to make the cake, ruining my coffee snob credentials)

There are two ways to make the icing, the easy way and the hard way. The hard way is to cream everything together by hand (I tried this at first). The easy way is to bung everything into a food processor, or in my case, a chopper and blitz till it’s smooth. When it’s all creamed together by either method, place the bottom piece of cake on the plate you’ll be showing the cake off on, then spread half the icing on. Place the top part on top and put the remainder of the icing on top. Decorate with the remaining walnut halves. If you want enough to cover the sides, increase the quantity of icing by at least half (I always make a mess of the sides of cake so extra icing is handy for patching holes).

NOM WITH A BIG MUG OF COFFEE AND SOME FRIENDS! (after everyone’s admired your icing skills of course).

Experimentation – peanut butter

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Tríona

I am told that there are “people” out there who don’t like peanut butter, not because they’re allergic and their face will swell up, but because they just don’t /like/ it. Well, this is not for those “people”, this is for us normal folk who enjoy smushed nuts smeared on toast.

We like peanuts in this house, they’re tasty, very tasty, and go great with beer, cider or just a big mug of milk. Every once in a while, we end up picking up a bag of peanuts that aren’t nice and crisp and seem to be under roasted. One day himself decided we should figure out how to make peanut butter to use up these less nice nuts.

In the quest to learn how to make peanut butter, it was discovered that stick blenders aren’t very good for making peanut butter, and that my mother will sleep through using her (loud) food processor to make the same. After a time, we picked up a handy wee chopper in Aldi for blitzing the nuts, as we don’t have room for a full-size food processor.

This evening’s experiment was to see if maple syrup would work nicely as it’s a good substitute for half the golden syrup in peanut butter cookies (recipe to follow at some point).

A handy ramekin, filled with delicious peanut butter.

200g salted peanuts
1 dessert spoon of maple syrup (proper stuff, you know, the stuff in glass jars that’s pretty runny) (Aldi do a good one that won’t break the bank, Marks and Spencer do a good one that will)
3 teaspoons vegetable or peanut oil (for the love of god don’t use olive oil or other strong tasting oil)
1/4 teaspoon of salt

In theory you can shell, skin and roast your own nuts, but buying bags of salted peanuts is just as easy. If you like a well roasted nut (an even more roasted one that how it was roasted before you bought it), scatter them on a lined tray and put into a 200°C oven for 10 minutes. Check them after five minutes and give a little shake, don’t let them scorch.

Then tip the nuts into your chopper/food processor, and start whizzing. When the nuts have turned into a coarse powder, add 2 teaspoons of the oil, the maple syrup and keep whizzing. My chopper isn’t amazing, so I periodically stop, scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl, and go again. It takes longer than you’d expect but the nuts should break down to a paste. Taste the butter, and add the salt if it’s needed (some salted peanuts are saltier than others). Add more oil if the paste is too stiff (you need to be able to spread it on toast at the end of the day).

So basically, lots of whizzing and a bit of extra oil is all you need to make peanut butter. The oil seems to be necessary to get the butter to come together enough to be chopped finer. Sugar is optional, but I like slightly sweetened pb, salty and sweet things are what taste buds were made for!

I’m looking forward to smearing this on thick slices of toasted scotch batch in the morning and drinking some fine fine coffee with it. (Also, next time I make it, I’ll be doubling the maple syrup, so you might want to experiment with that if you’ve a sweet tooth).

Microwave experiments – chocolate sauce

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Tríona

After rearranging the freezer to fit stuff in properly, I (re)discovered a tub of Aldi Strawberry flavour frozen yoghurt. This stuff is actually really nice, more fake strawberry sweets flavour than Wexford’s finest, but that suits me down to the ground. On its own it can be a little dull, and I’m all out of chocolate or otherwise sauces, so I decided to have a bash off making a quick chocolate sauce.

Many of the nice chocolatey sauces I’d come across before contained golden syrup to make them sticky, so I figured I’d bung some of that in (well, honey, as there was a squeezy bottle to hand, and the tin of golden syrup is a bit of a pain). I also threw in some butter, to give that nice buttery flavour and also to stop the chocolate being so firm (just in case the syrup didn’t do it’s thing). The chocolate came from Lidl and was very nice. “Bellarom creamy milk chocolate” is what the packet tells me.

After microwaving, the chocolate still looked solid, but the liquidy ingredients were well hot, so after years of making ganaches, I just gave it a few second to stand and then stirred it till the chocolate was smoothly distributed. At first the sauce on the frozen yoghurt (I keep calling it icecream tbh) was nice and saucey, but when it got chilled by the icecream it turned into a lovely soft-chewy toffee. So there was both failure and success in the same chewy bite. Will certainly refine this micro-sauce method in future.

Chocolate sauce on Aldi's finest fake strawberry flavour frozen yoghurt (it's actually well tasty if you like that sort of thing)

Into a microwavable mug add:

40g milk chocolate (the total bar weight, divided into the relevant number of chunks, practising arithmetic is good for you)
2 tsp honey or golden syrup (squeezy bottles of these are great)
1 heaped tsp of butter (ie a chunk that fits on a teaspoon and some bit above)

Microwave on full power for 20 seconds (I have no idea what wattage my microwave oven is, and I have no intention of pulling it out to read the sticker on the back (why they can’t write these things on the front is beyond me)). Be careful, the honey/syrup will have gotten pretty hot at this stage. Stir until all the chocolate is melted and pour quickly over icecream. If you eat it immediately the first bits of sauce are still runny, if you take loads of photos until you get a non-blurry one, it’ll be a bit toffee/chewy, but still nice (guess what happened to me…). Makes enough for one bowl of icecream for greedy people, two if you can share and aren’t fond of loads of sauce.

Lemon shortbread (for dipping in lemon curd)

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Tríona

Obsession with lemons you say? Who? Me? Surely not….

Intending to make lemon cake during the week, I bought a net of six unwaxed lemons in the supermarket. Sadly, I didn’t get around to it in time for my final day in my most recent lab rotation. So there were six lemons staring up at me for the past few days. Now, much and all as I love lemons, using all six at a go was going to be quite the feat, so I’ve done an experiment in lemon preservation (details to come shortly) and also made some curd. The curd used up two lemons. I used the zest of these two lemons to make the shortbread that follows (I decided I dont much like the bits of zest in curd, as my zester makes them too big).

Normally, Darina is my go to girl for kitchen help, but this time I followed Prue’s directions for shortbread, save that I substituted the rice flour for cornflour as I had that to hand. Rice flour and cornflour have no gluten in them, so when mixed with the wheat flour serve to reduce the overall gluten content of the biscuit to make it much lighter. Generally about a quarter of the flours is gluten free and the rest is wheat flour. Reducing the gluten content too much can result in a biscuit that disintegrates.

Lemon shortbread waiting to go into the fridge. Admire my quality fork-pricking of the dough...

110g Butter
55g Caster sugar
Grated zest of two lemons
40g cornflour
125g plain flour

I used my Aldi chopper to speed things up, if you have a proper food processor, use that, if not bring your mixing arm to the gym…

Beat the butter to soften it. Cream in the caster sugar and then mix in the zest. Sieve the cornflour and flour together and add to the creamed sugar/butter mix (I dont tend to sift flours when using the chopper, it’s fiddly and I’m lazy…) Blitz until it just about comes together then turn out and give it one last mix. If you’be been doing it by hand, it’ll come together into a nice smooth paste round then.

Roll the shortbread dough out to about 1cm thick on some greaseproof paper (if you try to do it on the worktop, it’ll just smush into place and stick, even if you flour it). Cut into your desired shape (I went with fingers, for good dipping times). Lay on greaseproof paper on the baking tray. Prick with a fork all over, and right through to the tray. Put the biscuits in the fridge to chill until firm. Pre-heat your oven about now to 170°C (I used 160°C as we have a fan oven, damn, I miss conventional ovens).

When the shortbread has firmed up, sprinkle on some caster sugar, for that authentic shortbread look. Pop into the oven for about 20 minutes, until the shortbread has turned a pale golden colour. Prue recommends scooshing under the shortbread with a palette knife (who owns a palette knife like) after they come out of the oven, leaving to cool for 5mins and then transfering to a wire rack, but I just slid the baking paper off the tray on to the wire rack. Be careful though, hot shortbread is fragile, so if they overhang the rack, they’ll break or if you try to move them without COMPLETELY supporting the underside, they’ll break. When they’ve cooled they’re much more robust.

Serve with lashings of lemon curd and some coffee!

Chocolate biscuit cake experimentation

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Tríona

I’ve had half a pack of digestives staring at me for the last week and a bit. Shocking stuff I know, but as a caffeine half-intolerant (none after lunch) coffee drinker and someone who doesnt like tea, I don’t have much opportunity for chowing on digestives in the evenings. The other half of the packet was sacrificed to the noble cause of being a cheesecake base (I’ll write it up soon, honest). I’ve never made chocolate biscuit cake before and got the idea into my head earlier that that’s how I’ll use up the biscuits.

A squidgy slice of chocolate biscuit cake, and a butterknife covered in squidge

I couldn’t find a recipe in one of my books, so armed with duckduckgo I did a quick search. The one I settled for is roughly based on the odlums recipe, except for a few changes due to what I had to hand. I can vouch for maltesers being great in biscuit cake, but I dont usually have them lying around the house.

200g chocolate digestives (broken up, not pulverised)
140g butter
80g golden syrup
125g dark chocolate
1 dessertspoon cocoa powder

Put the butter, chocolate, and syrup in a pyrex jug and microwave on full for 40 seconds. Stir, and put it in for another 40 seconds. Stir and decide if it’s no longer lumpy or not, if needed give another short nuke/stir cycle. If the mix is smooth, mix in the cocoa powder and then throw in the biscuits. Smush into a lined springform tin or cake tin and chill in the fridge (honestly, the lining is essential, I poured straight into my springform tin with a nubbly-cheesecake-holding base, whoops).

After chilling for two hours, I took the squidgy slice shown above, despite being imperfect it’s still lovely with a big glass of milk. I reckon it’ll set better by the morning (I’ll let you know if it doesn’t). Changes to be made in the future: increase biscuity content (quantity AND type, eg. rich tea), add malteasers, line the base of the tin, learn to wait for it to chill overnight.

Lemony delight (where “y delight” = bars)

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Tríona

For Easter my lovely fella’s lovely mammy invited me over for dinner, so I had to bring something tasty. I’ve been meaning to make something lemony for a while, and so lemon bars were made. Unfortunately, they’re awful tasty, so I had a couple for breakfast, leaving not quite enough to go round after dinner….

The base is a sort of lightly crispish base, like that of the caramel slices, and the topping is a lovely sweet lemon curd. I’d imagine dropping some of the sugar or increasing the amount of lemon juice should increase the tang, or making icing using the juice of another lemon should get a proper wince going.

A tray of lemon bars after some had been taken away for *cough* ehhh, testing....

175g plain flour
125g butter
50g granulated sugar (though I used caster and it was grand)
200g caster sugar
2 tbsp flour (I used self raising even though recipe called for plain)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2 medium eggs
Juice and grated rind of one lemon
Whatever you’d like to top it with (icing sugar/icing/fresh air)

Preheat your oven to 170°C. Grease and line a 20cm cake tin (mine was 18cm, first time I’ve ever bothered to measure).

If you have a food processor/chopper, you can use it here or you can do it by hand. Rub the butter into the 175g of flour until it’s like breadcrumbs, and then mix in the sugar (the 50g lot). Pour the crumbs into the tin and press down firmly. Bake for 20 minutes in the preheated oven.

While that’s cooking, prepare the curdy topping. Into your food processor/chopper/big bowl, add the sugar, flour, baking power and salt. I like to leave the wet ingredients until the base is nearly ready to come out of the oven. So you can use this time to get the rind off the lemon (this is a damned fiddly job, and I keep meaning to upgrade my zester). When the zest is off (add it to the dry mix above), roll the lemon firmly on the counter, and then juice over a sieve into a bowl (apparently rolling is supposed to get extra juice out by breaking up the insides a bit, either way rolling gets extra lemon smell onto your hands). Beat the eggs and add to the mix along with the lemon juice and whizz/beat well.

When the 20 mins for the base are up, it should be a nice light golden colour. Pour on the curdy mix and put back into the oven for another 20mins. The recipe reckons the middle of the cake should have a slight wobble and then it’s done, but I overcooked mine (25mins instead of 20) so no wobble (still tasted good though).

Leave to cool in the tin. You can dredge with icing sugar, or put a nice lemon icing on top, or you can do nothing like I did (I was running late, I’d probably have tried harder if I got up earlier). Slice into bars and serve with a bucket of coffee. The recipe claims 24 bars, but I think about fifteen good size bars is more like it.

Science Hack Day and crocheted blood cells

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Tríona

At the beginning of the month (March 3rd and 4th to be precise), I had the pleasure of attending ScienceHackDay Dublin, which was a great big hackathon in the name of Science! A hackthon is basically a long session hacking away at your projects or your friends’ projects, think staying up stupid late to get a paper in for a deadline, except more fun and the project is of your own choosing.

Just before science hackday starts, the network team are ready in their nest..... (Schro and VadimCK run a good network)

The event was very well organised, with food provided (including apple lattices for all!), and plenty of space to work. All internetworking sorts of things were well sorted too. After a few introductory project talks in the morning, people assembled off into groups to work on a variety of projects from programming to building hardware to visualise aurora. But wait, Tríona doesn’t do programming or building hardware, so what did she do for the 36 hour event?

A collection of crocheted cells and an antibody

Spot the phagocytosing granulocyte...

I did what I do best, and that’s Science (and crochet). So from about midday on the Saturday (I had chatting/networking to do before that) until 1am and from 10am on the Sunday till lunch, I crocheted various cells. I devised my own patterns for them, and tried very hard to document them, so I have one for the red cell and the lymphocyte, and I have half patterns for the antibody and neuron. I started the neutrophil pattern with good intentions, but X died when I went off to find jelly babies so I lost the (unsaved half-finished) pattern.

The red cell is the first pattern I did that day, and documented as I went along. I’ll put some more patterns up in the near future.

Red blood cell
dc = double crochet (that’s UK dc, a US sc)
dc2tog = double crochet 2 together, it’s a way of decreasing stitches (sc2tog for USians)
A magic circle is basically a loop you work into that can be tightened very tight to form a circle. Put two fingers together and wrap the yarn around them twice, then pick up a chain stitch as if these loops were your base stitch and work the rest of the row into the loops. When you get to the end of the first row, slipstitch to the first stitch and pull gently on the loops to work them tighter and tighter until you have no more hole, and that’s a magic disappearing circle!
Start each round with a single chain, this doesnt count as a stitch. Finish each round by slipstitching to the first dc of the round.
When you get to the end, leave at least a 30cm tail to bind off. I find I often have big gaps that a bit of darning can cover up. You’ll also have to put a stitch or two through the centre of the cell to pin the faces together in the characteristic biconcave shape.

12 dc into a magic circle
2 dc into each dc
*2dc into next dc, 2dc into next dc, 1 dc into next dc* repeated to end of round
*1dc, 1dc, 1dc, 1dc, into next four dc, 2dc into next dc* repeated to end of round
dc into each dc to end of round
Repeat round 4
*1dc, 1dc, 1dc, 1dc, into next four dc, dc2tog in next two dc* repeated to end of round
Repeat round 5
Repeat round 5
*dc2tog in next two dc, dc2tog in next two dc, one dc in next dc* repeated to end of round
At this point stuff the cell, remember, red cells have this biconcave disc shape, where the edges are thick and the middle is thin.
dc2tog until no stitches left

Caramel Slices (or, Diabetes in a Mouthful)

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Tríona

One of my favourite things to have with a cup of coffee is a humble caramel slice. They also make excellent treats to bring in to work (if you try to eat the whole tray at home on your own, I am not responsible for hospital bills). So, when I finished my second PhD rotation, I brought in caramel slices, to make doubly certain everyone would miss me….

That's a lot of caramelly goodness

Beware that the caramel is a) pretty intimidating to calorie counters, and b) somewhat tedious to make, but it totally pays off.

First you make the base. This base is nice and crumbly, but you can do a different type of biscuit if you prefer. I’ve been using this base since I first got the recipe for the slices more than fifteen years ago from my neighbour (hi stella! thanks!).

Biscuity base

8oz plain flour
4oz butter
2oz caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Prepare a baking sheet by putting some greaseproof paper on top. Rub the flour and butter together until it has the appearance of breadcrumbs, then stir in the sugar. Tip the crumbs onto the papered tray, and push around a bit until it’s level, but dont press it hard. Bake until golden around the edges (takes about 20 minutes). Leave aside to await its caramelly topping.

Biscuity base (this also doubles up as a crumble topping, just bake on top of fruit instead of on a tray).

The good stuff (caramel)

Can of Evaporated milk (400g I think, also note EVAPORATED, not the other sort)
8oz of butter
4 tablespoons golden syrup
Vanilla essence

For the caramel, combine all ingredients apart from the vanilla in a pot. Bring to the boil, stirring constantly. When everything has melted together, bring the caramel to a simmer, and stir constantly, for about forty to fifty minutes, until the caramel coats the back of a spoon. You’ll see it start to thicken and look more like caramel. Also, I’m serious about the stirring, CONSTANT STIRRING. Either farm off some of the stirring time to a younger sibling, or bring a book to hold in your other hand…

The caramel should coat the spoon nice and thickly when you dip it in the pot.

Pour the thick caramel on to the base and let to cool. Get a big glass of milk to drink while you scrape out whatever is left stuck to the pot (sometimes I leave a bit in the pot instead of pouring it all out, and make myself sick trying to eat ALL THE CARAMELS). When the caramel is cool, you can pour melted chocolate on top. I’m going to assume (never assume etc…) that you can melt chocolate, if not ask someone (me or another adult).

Once the chocolate is set, you can cut it into slices, pop it in a lunchbox, and make yourself a workplace hero!

Science is Delicious

Mostly about science and cake and, sometimes, both