Studio Marlowe

There’s a pun up there, get it? Ha…haha. The latest cupcake installment:

Hazelnut cupcakes, with a chocolate hazelnut mocha mousse filling. I’m thinking maybe I’ll try the cashew cupcakes next and keep up the nut baking theme that’s now going with the cupcakes.

Anyway, back to the cupcakes at hand. These are del-i-cious!!! I hadn’t done cupcakes with a filling before but it’s really quite easy. It’s rather entertaining to watch the cupcakes puff out a bit as the mousse goes in.

So part of the problem with both of the tops I’ve been working on recently (Anne and the matchmaker) is that they are both kind of fiddly. In the case of Anne, I need to sit down and figure out the set in sleeve math. The fair isle just requires a lot of concentration. I need something quick and a little mindless.

Re-enter Deirdre:

This piece stalled after the sleeves were stolen from my car last summer. But, with the body all done and the plan calling for simple raglan sleeves, Deirdre is perfectly suited to my current summer knitting mood–simple, fast, with a distinct possibility of being finished *soon*. I’m knitting another project on a deadline (that I won’t be posting photos of for a while, sorry!) so Deirdre will be competing with the other project for a bit, but I’ve now joined a second Ravelympics team, so I’ve decided D will be my entry for that (now that there’s an event for finishing up a WIP/UFO–after over a year on the needles, I think this qualifies!)

…something else has been pulled out of hibernation!

One of these days I am actually going to finish one of these sweaters I keep putting in and out of rotation.

The latest “new” recipe, from Veganomicon:

I have totally made sushi before, so the main new aspect was the tempeh filling. Which was actually doubly new because I have never cooked with tempeh before (it’s good, I will cook with it again).

I found the filling to be a little bland so I wound up adding a more rice vinegar and also a sprinkling of cayenne, which fixed things up nicely. And it is great food for summer since the only thing you really have to cook is the rice. I think I’ll be trying this again with some of the other filling suggestions.

A few of my personal notes for sushi assembly:

1. I usually only spread rice on half the nori piece, leaving a fairly big section of nori to wrap around the outside. I prefer this since it keeps the sushi pieces from getting too large and unwieldy and makes them roughly bite-sized, preventing the annoyance of your sushi falling apart after you have bitten off half of it.

2. I find it’s easiest to slice with a serrated knife. Authentic sushi chefs would probably faint with horror at this method, but hey…I was trained in the poorly lit basement of a girls’ dormitory in Chapel Hill, not some hallowed sushi restaurant in Japan.

A while back I posted that I had pulled Anne out of hibernation. She’s still out, despite the (until now) lack of subsequent mention:

I finished up the front! Now it’s juts the sleeves and finishing left to go.

I know, if I don’t start doing some more knitting soon I’m going to have to turn this into a cooking blog and then call up the Vegan with a Vengeance empire and demand to be paid for all the shameless pimping of their culinary genius that I do. To that end:

Thai green curry, from the original VwaV cookbook. The recipe includes instructions for making your own curry paste,which is the major labor intensive part. While I will concede that homemade paste is delicious, I will probably still use the stuff in a jar more often than not for weeknight cooking. I upped the vegetable content on this recipe by adding a green pepper and a couple of zucchini to the mix.

Okay, they’re really just peanut butter cupcakes. But the alternative title is Jimmy Carter cakes and I personally prefer it:

Normally I am sort of “eh” on the idea of peanuts in baking. Those peanut butter cookies with a Hershey’s kiss on top, for example, do nothing for me (and I have a serious sweet tooth–the desserts I can willingly turn down are few and far between). These, however, are actually pretty good. I think it may be the use of natural peanut butter instead of the usual stuff that is chock full of high-fructose corn syrup that makes the difference. Also the use of some decent chocolate on top. They are nice and dense and moist. Yum. I used half whole wheat flour in this batch (you know, to delude myself into thinking that these things might have some redeeming “healthy” qualities) and got good results with that.

Awhile back, I canceled my download service subscription with the intention of replacing all the links to do downloads via Ravelry.  Then stuff happened and…the link change did not happen.  Anyway, I sat down this afternoon and I think I’ve got them all, so you should be able to buy any of the patterns directly off the site here.  If you find a broken link, leave a comment and I’ll see about getting it fixed ASAP.

I have some other little website changes planned in the near future–hopefully they’ll all go smoothly but if not consider this post the advance warning!

Since I signed up for a Knitting Olympics team over on Ravelry, I decided to spend my weekend knitting time doing a little swatching (or, in KO parlance, “training”):

The stitch pattern is a mock honeycomb slip stitch that I found in a Barbara Walker book, and the yarn is Rowan Calmer, in a discontinued but fabulous shade of pink. The plans for this yarn have gone through some serious evolution. Plan 1 was to make an Aran-style cardigan out of it–I really liked the tapered cables I had improvised when knitting Mariah and wanted to do another cardigan incorporating those or something similar, but perhaps with more extensive cabling on the body. Then I started thinking about how I needed more lightweight layering pieces out here in CA–the temperature varies a lot throughout the day, although it rarely gets *really* cold or *really* hot. This temperature range is surprisingly difficult to dress for (although it is certainly pleasant to live in). So the plans shifted and I started thinking lace cardigan, perhaps accented with a big ribbed shawl collar and some wooden toggle buttons. But, I wasn’t seeing any lace stitch patterns that really seemed right. I started to think about the cable plans again–I wanted to do something with some texture, but not as “thick” as traditional cabling would result in. Then I saw this mock honeycomb, and after a little swatching, decided I might finally have a winner.

Now I’m just impatient for the Olympics to start! In the meantime, I’ll be doing as much pre-cast on design maths as possible, and trying to finish up/make progress on my current projects.

At the end of the sock tunnel.

This is all the sock yarn I have left:

So sock #2 is going to be done soon, thank goodness. I’m sorry, I know some people just love socks, but this one has been soooooo tedious. I have just wanted it done and over with the whole time. To reward myself for finishing this thing, I am absolutely casting on for something new. To heck with the other stuff I have on the needles already. I want something summery!