This time it’s the Cheshire Cat!
Last Sunday was my granddaughter’s birthday. Her party had an Alice in Wonderland theme and so instead of pin the tail on the donkey it was stick the smile on the Cheshire Cat.
I drew a cartoon version of the Cat and M and I painted it in pink and purple stripes:
here’s the Cheshire Cat minus its smile:
and here with smiles added by the children blindfolded:
For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.
Looking back again into old family photos I came across this one of me when I was a Brownie:
This was taken in our back garden when I was about 7 or 8 and you can just see my little sister coming into the photo. I loved being a Brownie.
For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.
Yesterday was CatsPlease on my blog and today it’s CakesPlease! I used to bake cakes every week, but haven’t done so for years.
Earlier this year I got the baking bug after watching The Great British Bake Off, and I was so taken with Mary Berry that I bought one of her books – Mary Berry’s Baking Bible. For the first time I bought a cookery book to read on my new Kindle Fire, partly because I have lots of cookery books and there’s no room for any more and also because the Kindle Fire has colour and the cover has a built-in stand so I can stand it up on the kitchen table to refer to it easily whilst cooking.
This contains a huge range of cakes, biscuits, traybakes, breads, buns, scones, hot puddings and pies, souffles and meringues and cheesecakes! Over 250 classic recipes.
Mary Berry writes:
Cakes are made to be shared so, once you have mastered a recipe, invite your friends and family to enjoy the fruits of your labour with a good pot of tea – happy baking!
So, I’m sharing the recipe for the Banana Loaf, which I made earlier this week and as I can’t physically share it here are my photos. First the ingredients:
This is what mine looked like:
It tasted delicious!
For more Weekend Cooking posts see Beth Fish Reads.
Sometimes I think I should call my blog CatsPlease as well as BooksPlease because of the number of cat photos I post. Today’s photos are of a cat called George. He came to live with us when D’s mother moved into an apartment on the third floor. He was quite a character and liked to sit on/in things. He was also quite vocal!
One day out in the garden I heard him miaowing:
He was sitting on top of the compost:
It was just the same inside. He liked sitting on tables:
And he especially liked sitting in the laundry basket on top of the clean clothes waiting to be ironed:
For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.
I’m currently reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang.
It begins:
At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China. The year was 1924 and China was in chaos. Much of it, including Manchuria, where my grandmother lived, was ruled by warlords. the liaison was arranged by her father, a police official in the provincial town of Xixian in southwest Manchuria, about a hundred miles north of the Great Wall and 250 miles northeast of Peking.
Wild Swans is a family memoir – the story of three generations of woman in Jung Chang’s family – her grandmother, mother and herself. This is the 2003 edition with an introduction by Jung Chang explaining how she came to write the book. She had always dreamed of being a writer, but growing up in Mao’s China it seemed out of the question, with most writers suffering in endless police persecutions. It was only after she had been allowed to come to Britain in 1978 to study that she had the freedom to write and to write what she wanted.
So far, I’m finding it fascinating, reading about her grandmother, who was one of the last generation of Chinese woman to suffer the practice of binding feet. I knew of this practice, but hadn’t realised just how much the little girls suffered and continued to suffer throughout their lives.
As this book is so long (over 600 pages in a small font) it’s going to take me quite a while to read it. I’l probably write a few posts on my progress.
First Chapter, First Paragraph is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.
We’ve had some beautiful skies this month. I took this photo early on Thursday morning of the sky at the back of our house:
I’m going to try painting it.
For more Saturday Snapshots see Alyce’s blog At Home With Books.
BooksPlease 