A Day for Relaxation

The kitties gave me the day off from sewing yesterday, although there was plenty of hand-stitching, as I'm just about to tell you. Smitty spent much of the day in his clubhouse, which meant Sadie had the top rung on the kitty pole.

My day started with Tree #11 of Twelve Trees for Christmas. My friend "Anonymous" asked me to link to the pattern for the trees again. It's an eBook from Mary Corbett, and you can purchase the book right here.

Tree #11 had three new-to-me stitches. I'd already done the woven fill stitch on the tree trunk. Next up was the "griffin stitch." The most challenging part of this stitch was getting the diagonal lines parallel and lined up with the intersections of the vertical and horizontal stitches. I first took long horizontal stitches, then long vertical stitches. Then, I used a straight edge to guide my needle-ups and needle-downs to line up the intersections.

That used the last bit of the light green floss on the diagonals. That floss is one from Weeks Dye Works. I purchased it as a part of a kit when I stitched the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines quilt lo these many years ago.

The floss was different from what I'm used to with DMC and Cosmo. It's a cotton floss, as they are, but it lacks the shimmer of DMC or Cosmo. I'm not sure what's different about it, but I'm glad to be finishing up the last of it.

So the next step was to couch over the "X" intersections of light green floss.

When I finished that, I did my grocery shopping and ran some errands. Getting an earlier start this time, the grocery store was relatively tame. I was kind of wishing I'd made a longer list.

When I got home, I had some lunch, then tipped back in the reclining chair and went back to work on the rest of it. I'm telling you...I could not put it down. This was the most fun piece to stitch. The next step was to weave circles around the remaining intersections. It was finished off with a whipped chain stitch around the outside, and a scalloped buttonhole chain stitch across the bottom.

I was biting my fingernails about the buttonhole chain stitch, but it turned out to be super easy.

When I had it all finished, I did a little bit of housework. Smitty was resting on his soon-to-be-RV-cubby alternative. The kitties are still 'spicious of this, but they are using it. I think they'll like it much better when it's out in the RV and gives them each a space of their own.

He stayed there as the sun set and he was still there past dark.

He didn't even come down when his dinner was served.

While he was napping, I tried scaling down another cake recipe to make it a cake for two. This is the Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread cake from the NYTimes. You can find the original recipe right here. Sometimes you can't click on those without a NYTimes subscription, so my apologies if that link won't work for you. I'm just about to give you my scaled down recipe.

When I canned Cranberry Pepper Jam and Cranberry Chutney a few weeks ago, I way over shot the mark on how many bags of cranberries I'd need. I ended up freezing a bag, and I still had a partial bag left over. Can you think of a better reason for baking than leftover cranberries? Because right at the moment it seemed like the best idea ever. So anyway...here's how it looked when it came from the oven.

It's baked in a 6-inch cake pan. Measuring, I figured out that a 6-inch cake pan has approximately half the volume of a 9-inch cake pan, and so I cut the recipe in half. It was easy to do...no partial eggs involved. Also, I skipped the step for marbling the cranberries into the cake. When I made this as a full-sized cake a while back, I thought the marbling was a waste of time. It really just distributed the cranberries throughout the cake, and the marbling was lost. In this case, I plopped the cranberry "compote" on top of the cake, and the cake baked up right over the top of it. When we cut into it, it looked like this.

I had a little trouble getting it out of the pan because of the parchment in the bottom. The parchment wanted to come up with the cake. I think I'd just use Baker's Joy in the future. It was disappointing when I discovered we had no Redi-Whip because I think that would have been a nice topping, but we enjoyed it just as is. The tart cranberries are a nice contrast to the sweetness of the cake. There is just a little bit of pepper in the recipe, which seems weird in a cake. It really gave the gingerbread a nice depth of flavor...and lots of ginger didn't hurt one bit.

So here's my recipe, adapted to make this a cake for two:

Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread for Two
adapted from the NYTimes
Serves 2-4

Ingredients:

1 Cup Fresh or Frozen Cranberries
1/2 Cup Granulated Sugar
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) Unsalted Butter
1/3 Cup Dark Brown Sugar
1/4 Cup Whole Milk
1/4 Cup Maple Syrup
2 tablespoons Molasses
3/4 Cups All-purpose Flour
1/2 Tablespoon Ground Ginger
1/4 Teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
1/4 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1/4 Teaspoon Kosher Salt
1/8 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1/8 Teaspoon Black Pepper
1 Large Egg, lightly beaten

1/2 Tablespoon Grated Fresh Ginger

Directions:

Heat oven to 350°F. and line a 6-inch square or round baking pan with parchment.

In a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan, stir together cranberries, granulated sugar and 1 tablespoon water. Stir the cranberries over medium heat until the sugar is completely dissolved and cranberries form a sauce that is syrupy and bubbling thickly, about 10 minutes. Aim to have about half the cranberries broken down, with the remainder more or less whole.

In a separate saucepan, stir together the butter, brown sugar, milk, maple syrup and molasses over medium heat. Bring it to just barely a simmer and then remove it from the heat. Do not let it come to a boil, or the mixture may curdle.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking powder, salt, baking soda and black pepper. Beat in the butter-maple syrup mixture and then beat in the eggs. Stir in the ginger. (I used a whisk for this step.)


Scrape the batter into the pan. Drop fat dollops of cranberry sauce onto the surface of the cake batter. Transfer the cake to the oven and bake it until the top is firm and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 40 minutes. Transfer the pan to a wire baking rack and let the cake cool completely before eating it.

Devour with great gusto.

* * * * *

Okay, so that brings me to this morning. I've traced out Tree #12 of the Twelve Trees for Christmas, and I'll get started on it today. Every one of those little leaves is done in fishbone stitch.

I mentioned previously that I had an idea about how to sew this into a little quilt, but then I read that Temecula Quilt Company is having a "Tiny Trees" sew-along starting December 4th and running daily through the 14th. There will be a 2-1/2 inch pieced tree every day during the sew-along. She doesn't mention how many trees will be included, but I'll hold off and join in. Just maybe the two projects can be sewn into one.

It's the best time of the morning in Kittyland. Here's where I left Sadie when I came upstairs to write today's post.

I think I'll join her under the quilt and get stitching on the last little tree. Also on today's agenda is to do some laundry and sew the binding on It's Raining Cats and Dogs.