A journal of everyday adventures in quilting, writing, cooking, and living.

I just finished making this quilt for a friend who has been under the weather:

What you can’t see from this photo is that the batting is made from alpaca wool, a beautifully light and warm material that sticks to absolutely everything and now covers every surface in my sewing room. I guess it’s a divine message that I need to vacuum more often.

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I think I could do a lot with this concept if I were a Dutch Old Master:

But this photo by Basketball Girl of a parakeet in flight would make an even better painting:

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Well, they do if they visit my mother-in-law’s temporary room at the nursing home, where they will find this tableau:

Hanging two clocks about four feet apart on the same wall seems like overkill in a place where hardly anyone even knows what day or year it is. I’m still trying to puzzle out the deeper meaning.

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Here’s the quilt I just finished making for my aunt, who is in the hospital. She told me her favorite colors are red, black, and autumn colors. I hope I got the colors right for her:

I made this quilt in sections, quilted each section, and assembled the quilted sections at the end. It makes the quilt a little lumpy along the joins between sections, but it’s certainly easier to handle the sections than a whole bulky quilt all at once.

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Another Easter and Christmas tradition in my family was making my great-grandmother’s cinnamon bread while listening to The Messiah. Making the bread is a five-hour marathon, but oh, so worth it for the yeasty smells of baking and the wonderful cinnamon taste on Easter morning. My sister called me from the grocery store in Boston this morning, having gotten insanely ambitious, wanting to know the ingredients list.  So here’s the recipe (with apologies for the vague instructions — that’s how it came down to me):

Great Grandmother’s Cinnamon Bread

Makes two loaves, more or less.  Bake in 350 oven.

1 cup of milk

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup butter

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

1 envelope dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water

4-5 cups of white flour

Lots of cinnamon and sugar, mixed together until it’s fairly dark with cinnamon

Scald the milk in a saucepan, then add the butter, sugar, and salt while the milk cools. When milk is warm, but no longer hot, beat in the eggs.  Dissolve the yeast in the water and add to the milk mixture. When milk mixture starts to bubble, add flour. Keep adding until the batter thickens and starts to crawl up the beater, like this:

It should still be a sticky batter, not a thick dough.Cover the mixing bowl with a damp towel and let rise until the dough has doubled in size, like this:

Punch down the dough. It should look like this:

Let the dough rise again until doubled, then punch down again.

Put the cinnamon and sugar mixture into a pie pan or bowl. Scoop up a handful of batter and use your fingertips to flatten the batter into a little pancake in the cinnamon mixture, getting it well coated with cinnamon sugar on both sides:

Twist the dough into a rope:

then put into a well buttered or no-stick bread pan.

Here’s what the loaves look like when they’re ready for their final rise:

Cover with a damp cloth and let rise one more time, then bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. The tops should be browned and the bottom of the pan should give a slightly hollow sound when tapped.

Remove loaves from bread pan immediately and cool before wrapping in aluminum foil. But don’t forget to eat some while it’s hot!

I’ve made myself hungry writing down this recipe, so it’s off to the kitchen to bake some cinnamon bread.

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I grew up in a Catholic family that really observed the austere season of Lent. We fasted and didn’t eat meat and gave things up and especially didn’t eat sweets for the 40 days starting on Ash Wednesday. On the night before Easter, we would go to the Easter vigil Mass, then come home to have a piece of this cake, baked by my mother earlier in the day, with vanilla ice cream.  That combination of warm cake and cold ice cream gave real meaning to the idea of the resurrection. It’s best as a six-layer cake with a double recipe of chocolate butter cream frosting, but it’s delicious and tender as a sheet cake too.

Kay Downs’ Devil’s Food Cake

• 1 c. softened butter
• 2 c. sugar
• 3 squares unsweetened baker’s chocolate
• 5 eggs, separated
• 1 c. buttermilk
• 2-1/2 c. cake flour (not regular flour)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water

Preheat oven to 325. Dissolve soda in boiling water and set aside. Melt chocolate. Cream butter, add sugar gradually. Add melted chocolate, mix well. Add egg yolks. Beat. Sift four and salt together, then add them alternately with the buttermilk. Add vanilla, then soda/water mixture. Beat egg whites until stiff, but not dry. Fold in gently until just incorporated. Bake in three 9-inch greased and floured tins for 20 minutes. Cool before frosting. To make a six-layer cake, cut each layer in half horizontally with a serrated knife after it cools. Frost with my grandmother Kay Watson’s chocolate buttercream frosting:

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Melt together:

• 6 generous tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
• 6 tablespoons milk

Beat in one pound powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Add nuts if desired. I like it with a dash of salt added.

This chocolate cake with chocolate frosting (with vanilla ice cream again, of course) was also the cake of our childhood birthday parties. There are so many old photos of a table surrounded by people with puffed out cheeks, helping the birthday child to blow out the candles on this cake.

One of the (few) sad things for me about being a parent is that my own girls don’t want me to make this cake for their birthdays. They prefer angel food cake out of a box, with chocolate whipped cream frosting. It makes me realize that the chocolate cakes of my childhood, like other memories, existed in a certain time and place, and can’t be fully shared with anyone who wasn’t there.

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It’s courting time for the flock of turkeys that lives in the canyon behind our house. They’ve been coming up onto our lawn for the last couple of weeks so the males can show off their plumage and the females can completely ignore them. Here’s the boys’ club at about 7 this morning:

Some of the females actually seemed slightly interested today, instead of wandering away and pecking at the ground, the way they usually do:

I’ll keep you posted.

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One of the moms in Basketball Girl’s class is expecting twins in a few weeks. Here’s what I made for the baby shower:

Oh, to be eating for three!

For those of you who would like a super-easy, always-a-winner potluck recipe, here’s my foolproof brownie recipe (adapted from the old Joy of Cooking recipe):

Best Brownies Ever

5 squares unsweetened baker’s chocolate

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick butter

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup flour

Preheat oven to 350.  Melt the chocolate, butter, and salt together over low heat.  While the butter mixture is melting, beat the sugar, eggs, and vanilla together until creamy and smooth.  Add the flour and beat until just blended.  After the chocolate mixture is completely melted, cool for 5 minutes, then add to the sugar/flour mixture. Beat on low speed until the chocolate is well blended in.  Pour into a 13 x 9 pan or spoon into a greased mini-muffin pan.  Bake for 30 minutes at 350 (even if you’re making the muffins). The mini-muffin version is crustier and liked even by my husband, who isn’t a big brownie fan.

I love this recipe because it takes only about 10 minutes to assemble the ingredients, but tastes so much better than a brownie mix.

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Basketball Girl and I spent the last several days up in the Sierra Mountains at a little old log cabin resort with some friends from school. This photo was taken less than three hours from our house, where the fruit trees are already blooming:

And here’s some of the non-stop sledding action from the hill between the cabins. My child is the one in the back with no gloves, jacket, hat, or snow pants. Not that she didn’t HAVE those things. But getting her to actually WEAR them is an epic battle.

Whoops, girl overboard!

No wonder she’s a trifle stiff today.

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