Pumpkin Cream Cheese Spice Bread

So given that we ate the Blueberry Coffee Cake in about 2 days (I could say my husband ate most of it, but I'd probably be lying), and I'm really bored waiting for more quilting supplies, I decided to bake something else!

I chose another sort of cake/bread recipe that I found on Pinterest again. This one is called Pumpkin Cream Cheese Spice Bread, originally from An Edible Mosaic.

Looks yummy, right?

Now, I don't have a loaf pan, sadly, so this was a bit of an experiment.

Ingredients:

   Cheese batter:

• 8 oz (225g) cream cheese, room temp
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup (30g) powdered sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

   Pumpkin Spice batter:

• 3/4 cup (150g) brown sugar, lightly packed
• 2 large eggs
• 3/4 cup (180g) pumpkin puree
• 2 Tbsp canola (rapeseed) oil or sunflower oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cup (160g) all-purpose flour
• 1 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 1/8 tsp cloves

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C). Lightly grease 3 mini loaf pans (or, in my case, 3 round cake pans).

Combine cheese batter ingredients in medium bowl with electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Set aside.

Whisk together brown sugar and eggs in a medium bowl until light and fluffy, then stir in pumpkin, oil and vanilla.

The best kind of pumpkin, ask any American! 

It is ridiculously expensive, but well worth it :)

In a separate bowl, whisk or sift together the dry ingredients.

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet, careful not to overmix.

This batter, btw, tastes incredible. I know, raw eggs and all that, but if you're into licking the spoon, I highly recommend it :) 

Divide the pumpkin batter between the 3 pans, then pour the cheese batter on top. It looked quite thin once I put it in the pan, but I figured I'd wait to see what happened when it was done.

Bake until golden around the edges, about 35-40 minutes, or until toothpick inserted inside comes out clean. I checked mine after 30 minutes, and either because of the pan I used or my oven, it was pretty much spot on.

I decided because they were so thin to basically just stack them. I bet it'd taste really great with some cream cheese frosting in between the layers, but my second package of cream cheese went mouldy, so I just stacked them up as is, and it's just for us so the presentation doesn't really matter anyway!

It smells amazing, by the way. Nothing like the smell of pumpkin bread in the oven to make you drool! 

It was actually really good, but a wee bit on the bland side. I think possibly doubling the amount of cream cheese batter would go a long way toward making it less bland, because that had a nice tang to it and brought out the spiciness of the pumpkin bit. On the other hand, warmed up with a little bit of butter it was really delicious, so depends on your individual taste and what you want out of it. If it's a dessert, I think it needs a bit more sweet and spicy; if it's a smooth breakfasty sort of cake loaf you're after, I'd keep it as is and spread with butter.

Still, pretty yummy, so an overall success, I think :)

Lattices and Lillies - Part 2

So today I set about trying to figure out how to make the back of the quilt work, given that I hadn't really gotten enough fabric for the backing, which was originally going to be solid green with one lattice block in the corner. Because I had a few extra triangles, I decided to just make a row of blocks instead.

The colour of the back doesn't really show well here, it's a bit more of a blueish green than the weird olive-y colour it shows here. But anyway, after measuring that my quilt was around 41" square, I decided (to be safe) to make the backing about 43" square to give a bit of leeway. After constructing the blocks I still didn't have enough width, so added some 3" strips to either side, and then cut the remaining fabric in 2 segments, one about 8" and one about 24". So that should give me a backing that is slightly bigger than necessary, which is good, better too much than not enough!

I also had to decide what to do about the binding. Given the dimensions of my quilt, I calculated I needed about 172" of binding, plus a bit of extra, so 200". Ideally I'd have probably wanted to use either the lattice fabric or the backing fabric, but in typical me fashion, I cut too many strips for the lattice itself, which were too thin for binding, and wasn't left with enough. Fortunately, from the fat quarters I had a small strip of each left over, and managed to scrape together enough fabric. In fact, I probably have too much now. I think I have about 300" or so. I'm not sure how it'll look as well, might be too busy, but I'll have a play around with it before sewing it on. Otherwise I'll probably get an unrelated fabric in a matching colour.

My binding roll!

Now I just have to wait for the batting to arrive in the post so I can start quilting, because the leftovers from my last quilts are just a few inches too small! I feel like I spend half my time waiting for things to arrive in the post.

In other news, I'm getting seriously ready to have this baby now, especially now that Button is considered full term (yay!). Much as I love being pregnant (most of the time), I have forgotten what it's like to walk without waddling, or turn over in bed without grunting. I feel like a bit of a time bomb, and I'm just ready to experience labour, and have my life totally changed. I know I'll probably miss feeling Button kicking inside me (even though sometimes it hurts!), and knowing that my body is capable of such a miraculous and amazing thing, but I can't wait for the adventures that Button will bring!

Lattices and Lillies Quilt

Because I ran out of white thread AGAIN while making a second Turning Squares quilt, and because our local HobbyCraft seems to have no white thread that's 100% cotton, I decided to get some fat quarters and some colourful thread and start another quilt to sell.

I found a cute line of fabric called Free Spirit by Rowan, which has sort of a modern Asian vibe to it. I wanted to do something a little more intricate than previously, and a little more challenging, so I decided to make some sketches first.

My sketch.

I like the kind of lattice look to it. To do this I calculated that I needed to make 36 half square triangles (HSTs) from my fat quarters, and I had 5 fat quarters in total. I calculated how many squares I could make of various sizes using this fat quarter chart I found on Google:

I'm not sure the original author of this chart, sorry!

Using my 5 fat quarters, I needed to make approximately 8 squares from each quarter, so I needed to make 6" squares.

6" squares.

Once I made my 6" squares, I drew a line diagonally and cut across the line. Make sure you pin multiple fabric layers together so they don't swivel around too much while you're cutting, unless you are cool enough to have a rotary cutter.

Cut HSTs. 

If you're into a more random quilt you can just sew 2 squares together 1/4" to each side of the line, but I wanted it a bit more planned than that, so I just cut them all first (You wont need all of them if you're following along). I then took out 4 single triangles for the corners.

Then what I did was matched up the triangles and sewed them together so that I had an equal number of every combination of fabric, just to make sure I had enough to play with. I then laid them out in the desired positions. My only concern was that there were no identical fabrics next to each other, so other than that it was pretty much random.

 My initial layout.

Once I constructed all the squares I then started adding the lattices. I chose to just make 1 1/2" strips of my lattice fabric and sew them on as is without cutting them to size first. I picked a corner and started from there, adding the short strips one by one.

Starting the lattices.

Once I added all the short strips on the same diagonal, I then attached strips in the opposite direction. On the longest strips I had to sew two strips together, making sure to keep the seam in the centre of the quilt to avoid it looking odd.

I then wanted a border, but I decided to make it slightly bigger, so I made 2 1/2" strips and sewed them around the edges.

The finished quilt top!

Originally I was going to add 2 borders, but I didn't get enough of the backing fabric, so I decided to just have the one border, it looks pretty good anyway!

For the back I only got 1 metre of a sort of light greenish fabric, but I have a bunch of extra HSTs left over, and some of the lattice strips so I think I'm going to put some kind of embellishment on the back as well. Possibly a horizontal strip of the lattice to divide the back up so I have enough fabric, but I'm saving that as tomorrow's project!

----

On a separate note, I have put up my first pattern in my Etsy shop - Tara Doodle Doo - to sew your own knitting needle roll, designed to hold interchangeable circular needles, only £2.99!

Or, if you want to just skip the crafting and buy a 

pre-made roll, I've got a few ready to ship!

Blueberry Coffee Cake

A coffee cake is not, as many British people around me seem to think, a coffee-flavoured cake (well, it can be, but that's not usually the point). It is instead a class of cakes intended to be eaten alongside coffee (for example, as part of a breakfast meal) or that may be eaten during a coffee break or offered to guests on or around a coffee table. I gather it's an American thing, this type of coffee cake (especially because here in the UK it's usually a tea break rather than coffee).

I chose this recipe based on the above picture on Pinterest, which is probably dangerous, but it just looked so good! In following the link, the ingredients looked pretty standard, and it called for a large amount of fruit, which I always feel is a good start.

So, the ingredients:
Crumble topping:

• 1/2 cup (100g) brown sugar
• 1/2 cup (65g) flour
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp cardamom
• 1/4 cup (57g) butter, softened

Cake:

• 2 cups (255g) flour (I used cake flour for this part, but all purpose will probably do!)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 3/4 cup (150g) sugar
• 1/4 cup (57g) butter, softened
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup buttermilk*
• 3 cups fresh blueberries**

*Now before we start with the steps, I haven't really been successful at finding buttermilk very often, and I rarely have it on hand. You can use regular milk, but the acidity of the buttermilk reacts a bit better with the chemicals in the baking process, and because it's really easy to make buttermilk, there is really no excuse.

There are various methods for DIY buttermilk, but usually the standard is to add 1 Tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar to a measuring glass, then fill up to the 1 cup mark with whole milk (you can use 2%, but it really depends on the recipe). Since this only called for 1/2 cup of milk, I instead added 1 1/2 tsp (equivalent to 1/2 Tbsp) of lemon juice and filled up to the 1/2 cup measure. This way you don't end up with leftover buttermilk if you don't need it. Set aside for at least 5 minutes. It WILL get clumpy. This is normal, that's the point!

Homemade buttermilk - the clumps are normal!

** I actually misread this, and only put 2 cups of blueberries in, but I think it turned out pretty well, but I think even more could be even better, so I'd probably say, depending on the size of your blueberries, 2-3 cups would suffice.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 C). Grease a 9" square pan (or a circular springform pan, which is what I used because it's what I had on hand!).

Crumb topping ingredients

In a medium bowl, combine the crumb topping ingredients with a fork until crumbly. I'm not sure if it was the fact that my butter was mostly melted or the fact that my flour was cake flour, which is finer than normal flour, but mine was a bit more squishy than crumbly. It seems to have turned out fine, so I went with it. Should taste the same! I also should note that I didn't have cardamom or nutmeg. For some reason I always assume that I have these on hand, but rarely ever do. Instead I used Pumpkin Pie spice, which you probably can't find in the UK, but it's a delicious combination of spices used in pumpkin pies, and I'm sure will taste just as amazing.

Cake ingredients

In another medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and vanilla and blend until smooth. Then alternately add the flour mixture and the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the flour. I'm not exactly sure why this is important, but it does make it easier, as the batter is very very thick. Make sure to keep pushing your ingredients down with a spatula or else you'll get streaks of unmixed flour mixture in your cake, which no one wants.

Next is the best part, the blueberries! Add your blueberries and fold gently, trying not to burst them, because otherwise they'll not cook in the fabulously juicy delicious way you want. You can use either fresh or frozen, but in my freezer things tend to get freezer burned, and I again didn't want my cake watered down by the melting ice! If you do use frozen blueberries, don't thaw them beforehand, just dump them in as is.

It looks like a lot of blueberries, but actually this is only the 2 cups. As I mentioned earlier I misread the instructions (I was using my phone, the screen was tiny!) but it still looked turned into a decent amount anyway. You can really use any fruit with this, I particularly like blueberries, raspberries or apples, but strawberries might be nice too. If you plan on washing your fruit first (probably recommended), make sure you wash them ahead of time if you can so that they're dry by the time you're adding them. You don't want to add any unnecessary water to your batter.

Spoon the batter into your pan - it's really thick, don't be put off! And spread out as best as you can, but don't be too perfectionistic about it. The hallmark of a good coffee cake (in my opinion) is that it's not smooth and regular, but full of little holes and crevices.

Sprinkle the crumb topping on top. Again, I had difficulty with this part, because mine was very squishy. I probably could have added more sugar or flour or something, but I didn't want to mess with the taste, and I figured the butter would melt anyway and you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So I just went with it!

All ready for baking!

Pop in the preheated oven for 50-60 minutes, or until a toothpick stuck in the centre comes out clean. Depending on your oven I'd keep an eye on the top so it doesn't burn, as it will rise up a bit, and pop some foil over it if necessary to prevent burnage. I had to do this at around 40 minutes into baking, and I also popped the shelf down a level to try to control the heat at the top, as my oven is definitely top heavy on the heat.

Another good reason for a springform pan - it will cool a lot more quickly, 

and therefore you can enjoy the deliciousness sooner!

I think the crumb topping doesn't really look like it's meant to. It kind of just became part of the cake in the end. It certainly doesn't look like the picture at least! Whether this was because of the type of flour I used or because I did something else wrong, who knows. Maybe adding the crumb topping 15 minutes before the end would have given a better result? Something to work on for the future anyway. :)

My lunch today, really healthy, I know. I have somehow managed to only gain 5kg in my entire pregnancy (the average is 12kg), but if maternity leave keeps up like this that might change in the next few weeks!

I had to give in to the caffeine today as well and make myself a French press coffee, it's been so long since I've had anything but instant decaf, and I'm a bit nostalgic for a proper cup of coffee! So, despite obviously not looking as perfect as the online picture, it was still amazingly yummy!

Turning Squares - FIUF

It's done! I LOVE how this one turned out. I decided in the end to use the leftover binding from my last quilt, because the colour matched perfectly, and also the spots sort of echoed the orange spotty giraffes that appear in some of the patchwork strips. I had a little trouble attaching the binding because of the way the fabric warped with the spiral - I had to unpick it in several spots and resew. But I think I'm slowly learning some patience. Also my walking foot came in the post today, which made the binding go on a bit more straight. Definitely going to be using that foot a lot!

It's just so colourful and fun! It's also incredibly snuggly and the perfect weight for a baby quilt. I used the same batting as in my last quilt - a cotton/bamboo blend, which I sadly am now running out of, so I'll have to get some more for my next project.

I'm debating bringing it to the hospital with us to bring Button home in, because I absolutely cannot wait to wrap him in this!

The full quilt top with the binding. Needs a bit of ironing on the binding, but I'm so pleased with it! Now I have to come up with a plan for the remaining fabric from this line. I'm tempted to make another the same as a gift, but I'll have to have a think first. :)

Another finish it up Friday success!

Turning squares - Part 2

I've finished the quilting of my turning squares quilt! I decided in the end to go with a spiral pattern. The somewhat challenging thing about doing this was that because both the back and front of the quilt had a distinct centre, I needed to find a way to match them up as near perfect as possible, otherwise the spiral would look strange.

The way I decided to do this was before taping my quilt back to the floor, I stuck a straight pin through the centre, sharp side up. Then when laying the layers on top, I just had to make sure that I placed the centre first. It was a little challenging, because I also wanted to line up the corners and the centre seams of each side, so swivelling the fabric around on top of the batting was a bit of a pain. In the end I got everything pretty well centred.

Once all the layers were basted together, I found a small bottle cap to mark out a circle in the centre. In hindsight I probably should have just started in the centre and spiralled outward, but I thought a circle would look better. Oh well.

I used my normal presser foot for this, and think (again, hindsight!) that a darning foot would have been easier at this point, because the circle was so tight I had a lot of trouble turning the quilt. Eventually I got it, after a few false starts.

Another thing I'll say that would have made my life much easier had I thought about it. I recommend going CLOCKWISE in your spiral. I started out anti-clockwise, and realised as soon as I got a bit further out from the centre, that this meant that at some point I would be trying to swivel the entire bulk of my quilt through the harp space (that's the bit in between the needle and the arm) of the machine. Silly me.

Fortunately, as you can see, this quilt was fairly small so it all fit through the machine and was only a little annoying at times, but if you're doing a large quilt in this fashion, it probably would get really difficult. I suppose on the flip side had I done it the other way I might have struggled with the bulk of the quilt pulling off the table, but I could have fixed this by moving my machine to a better part of the dining table.

Here's the result! I had some issues with the fabric warping a bit. Possibly a walking foot would be a better choice once you're out of the tight inner circle, but I don't yet have a walking foot. So it's a bit wonky in places, but I like the overall effect. I didn't do the spirals too perfectly. Not only did I think this would make the process much slower, but I also thought that if I tried to make it perfect, I'd undoubtedly notice any imperfections much more. So while I used my presser foot width as a rough guide I made sure to just do it in a rough sort of way.

Closeup of my somewhat wonky lines.

Here's what the back looks like. There are a few places where there are some wrinkles in the backing. It REALLY annoys me, but the majority of them were so far back towards the centre that it would have been an absolute nightmare to unpick and fix, and I only noticed at the end. Oh well, live and learn. Since this is just for Button, I'm just leaving it. If I were ever to bring a quilt to any kind of contest or festival or whatever, or if it were a gift for someone else, I'd probably be much more persnickity, but hopefully Button is not going to mind.

Now my next task is figuring out what to use for binding. I have a lot of extra stripey fabric, but I'm not sure if it would be better to just use white, as it's a very busy quilt as it is. But for now, a nap!

Turning Squares Quilt

Here's my next project! I'm seriously on a bit of a crafting binge. So this is another Moda Bake Shop pattern which features a quilt from Kitchen Table Quilting, but I've made it much much smaller than the original pattern, because it's for baby Button! 

Here is my inspiration. Turning Squares Quilt

Gorgeous isn't it? I love the colours of it as well, but since this is for a baby boy, I wanted something a little less girly and pink. So I chose the Giraffe Crossing line by Riley Blake Designs.

It's hard to see the patterns, but there are giraffes, and it is adorable.

It's not specifically boy fabric, but I like that. I'd rather have it somewhat neutral anyway. I originally planned on having 3x4 squares for the quilt rather than the 6x6 squares of the original, and as usual I miscalculated the amount of fabric I'd need. For some reason I find this really difficult. Ask me to calculate a drug dosage and I'll give it to you in 15 seconds, but after an hour of trying to work out how many strips of each thing I needed, I got it all wrong.

So anyway, you basically need 3, 2.5x12.5 inch strips and 6, 2.5x6.5 inch strips for each square. This is a great jelly-roll project, as seriously cutting is so tedious without a rotary cutter! Also I feel like I'm more likely to have things straight and in line if they're precut in some way. Plus I'm a bit lazy. Hah!

In the tutorial, she has you just making a bunch of squares, however I know that if I just made the squares I'd end up with all the light coloured bits on one side and it wouldn't look random enough. So I chose to lay out the strips. I also drew a sketch of how I wanted the turning squares bits to look, as I was making it so much smaller so wanted it to still look okay since it wouldn't be able to be quite as symmetrical as the original.

As I was laying it out, I realised that, once again, my plans were a bit too big for purpose, so I decided to do a 3x3 square quilt instead, which is a bit more portable and can be used as the cradle quilt and a pram quilt. Plus now I have oodles of fabric left over and can make lots of other things with this adorable fabric!

I'll spare you the details of the actual sewing bit, as I basically did as Erica described in the tutorial. I did struggle to line up the seams, as usual, but I managed to muster the patience to unpick a few bits and lined nearly all of the seams up pretty well. I imagine this would be easier if I had a rotary cutter and mat and could trim the pieces to exact squares, as at the moment I'm really just eyeballing if things are square.

Now here's where I went off on my own for a bit. My backing fabric was from the same line, the lightest of the stripey fabric, but I wanted to do something a little more exciting with it than just slap it on the back. Partly this is because it was just after lunch and I still needed some way to occupy myself for the rest of today, and partly because I like how the last quilt had the patchwork detail, and I felt this one needed something interesting on the back as well.

After a few sketches of various ways to treat the striped fabric, I came up with a sort of play on the turning squares, and made kind of turning triangles for the back.

For this I needed 4 squares of the fabric, each measuring half the dimensions of the quilt top. I measured the quilt top at 36.5" (93cm) square exactly, so I halved it and then added some extra to make sure I had some leeway to line things up if the sewing wasn't exact. So I cut out 4, 50cm squares of my backing fabric. I then pinned it all together to keep it stable, and folded it in half into a triangle and ironed it to have a line to cut on. Sorry I didn't take pictures of any of this process, but basically it's as easy as it sounds.

Once I cut the triangles, I again laid it all out onto my table, played around with it a bit to see if there were any better ways to do it, and then started sewing!

Somehow I managed to match the corner seems up perfectly on the first try. This nearly never happens with me, so I was quite excited about it, and I think the back looks pretty neat!

Tomorrow, it's on to fixing the batting and starting to quilt it together! I'm thinking at this point I might try a new quilting pattern. I'm thinking doing either one big spiral around the quilt to contrast with all the straight lines or doing random wavy lines out from the centre. My only issue with this is trying to make sure I have the centre of the top and bottom lined up exactly, but I have a plan to accomplish this. More on this tomorrow! :)

In other, non-crafty related news, I had a midwife appointment today, and all is proceeding as planned. Button's head is engaged, and he's getting ready for his big entrance! Ahh!