Summer Dreams

The summer holidays are finally here - huzzah!!! This means I'm fortunate enough to have lots of time to spend on various crafty projects.

The first thing I did was to buy an ice cream maker. For this, I partly blame my friend Katie for getting me into ice cream making - but the ice cream is delicious! I've bought a Magimix 1.1L from John Lewis for only £40 and Katie gave me a basic recipe which I can adapt and experiment with.
The first ice cream flavour I tried was Vanilla Fudge; the first attempt wasn't all that successful, but the second attempt was much better!

This is pretty simple to make. First, take some milk and caster sugar and heat over a hob until the sugar dissolves (takes less than 30 seconds!). Then, add double cream and vanilla essence - stir it all together and then put into the ice cream maker. After that, it's just a case of letting the ice cream maker freeze churn your mixture, and then adding the vanilla fudge chunks when the mixture is almost done (when it looks more like ice cream) Finally, put it into a freezer safe container and put it in the freezer until you're ready to eat! Needless to say, it tastes pretty darn good! Next, I want to try making cherry ice cream - watch this space for that one!!

I also tried a new biscuit recipe: Vanilla and Chocolate Pinwheel biscuits - which taste pretty good, but were actually quite hard to make, which was surprising because the recipe was in the children's section!

First you make the vanilla dough and then you make the chocolate dough and chill them both in the fridge. Then, you roll them both out to the same size rectangle, put one on top of the other and then roll them like a Swiss roll and chill in the fridge again. Finally, you'd slice it into about 20 biscuits and put on baking trays. However, I found that the dough was really sticky - especially the chocolate one - which was solved by longer time in the fridge and a bit of extra flour. Took me a little while longer than it should have done to fix it, but I think it worked out well in the end!

A new thing that I'm also going to try is chocolate making. Yes, I know I tried that before but it was a bit of a disaster - there's an earlier blog post on it if you don't remember! A few weeks ago, I went with the Brownies to Stanley's Store in Bovingdon for a cupcake decorating course which was amazing! I learned lots about using sugar paste to make decorations and how to use a piping bag, and I was only watching! This Sunday, Katie and I are going to go there on one of their chocolate making courses - I'm really looking forward to it! As well as having a huge amount of fun with chocolate (enough said!) - the store is also an old fashioned sweet shops and sells unique handmade gifts. For more details, you can find their website on the right hand side of your screen, and I'll keep you posted on our progress on Sunday!

I'm also working on a cross stitch, but as it's a gift for someone I'm afraid I'll have to keep that under wraps for a little bit longer ...sorry!!

In the dressmaking department, I've booked onto a course at The Fabric Warehouse in Cowley. It's spread over 2 Thursdays and by the end of it we'll have made a skater dress. I know I can follow patterns to make a wearable product, but it's always good to pick up tips from an expert and I am a little bit rusty on my pattern reading. Also, I might learn how to fit a garment properly, which would be useful given that I'm not exactly a conventional shape! I've got lots of fabric and patterns waiting for me in my sewing room which shall keep me busy over the summer I'm sure! I've also got those cushions to finish - just need to get up to my mum's overlocker to finish off the edges!

That's all for now - stay tuned!