Baking gone a bit wrong - honey and peanut butter bars

My friend was coming to stay for a few days, and trying to play good hostess I asked her what she wanted to have for breakfast - given that we are a weird household when it comes to this supposedly important meal and either skip it entirely or just have cereal bars. So I bought a big box of porridge oats for her, but then was left with a dilemma: what to do with the remainder? Well, I'd been meaning to make the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's honey and peanut butter bars, and now was my chance.

Stuck at home on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I decided to give them a go. Of course any normal person would read the recipe, go to the shop and buy the ingredients etc etc. But not me, in the spirit of experimentation I decided that, even though I didn't have enough of most of the things needed to make these bars, I would press on.

Not enough butter? No problem, instead of 125 grams I just used the 50 grams that I had, thinking I could supplement with peanut butter. But no, not enough peanut butter either, so I just chucked in the pan 140 grams, desperately trying to scrape as much as possible out of the jar. No oranges? Just try and zest an already zested orange to get a teency bit of zest out, supplementing instead with the juice of said orange and the zest of two lemons instead of one. And who weighs honey? Its a pain to even get off the spoon in the first place, let alone getting it off the spoon, onto the scales, off the scales and into the pan (some hindsight googling reveals that one tablespoon, which is what I used, is about 15 grams, so again, way off the 45 grams the recipe calls for). Oh yeah, and the the mixture didn'y quite fit the dish, so I left a gap. What could be the harm.

Well, they didn't quite work. They taste nice (and actually sweet enough, so not sure about the sugar and honey quantities) but the consistency is  different to the ones I had tried before, I assume because of the reduced fat content and reduced amount of honey. And of course, in the spirit of totally ignoring the recipe, I cut them too soon so they crumbled a bit more than they should have. But I guess not bad for such a deviation from the original!

So the moral of the story is, don't stay in on a sunny day and stick to the recipe.

Edit: I am assured that they don't taste like they went wrong, so maybe not such a disaster after all. 

Geeky knitting - knitting a retina!

My plans to finish my Petrie shell in 2-3 week were completely optimistic as usual - I did very little knitting while on a (work) trip in Italy, as I was busy busy busy! I did manage to get most of the back done, but there's still a long way to go (should really have converted it to knitting in the round, I have decided that purling really slows me down). And to complicate matters further, I agreed to participate in collective knitting project.

Last month I joined the WI (women's institute) in an effort to meet some local women and participate in some fun (and crafty activities). The WI is quite an old institution, and has typically been associated with old ladies baking cakes, making jam, knitting and drinking tea. But in recent years it has seen a revival of sorts, with many 'new wave' WIs opening up around the UK, in particular in urban areas such as London, and attracting younger women. After a lot of research in the local WIs, I braved my first meeting back in February (for some cheese tasting!) and then joined properly in the April meeting, when we learned how to quilt.

A couple of weeks ago our president asked us if we wanted to participate in a collective knitting project, organised by the knitting group of the Institute of Ophthalmology in London. Their aim is to create a knitted retina, down to the cellular level: rods and cones (the photoreceptors, or simply the cells that detect light and offer visual information), retina ganglion cells (the cells that receive the visual information from photoreceptors and transmit it to the brain), bipolar cells (which transmit the information between photoreceptors and retinal ganglion cells) and muller cells (a type of glial cell that support other neurons in the retina). For anyone interested, here is a schematic of approximately what this looks like. One of their members wrote the patterns to knit each cell type, and they were looking for volunteers beyond their knitting group to knit the various cell types.

I offered to make a couple of rods, and here they are. The pattern was really simple, and the knit quite fast, but as usual the sewing up was my downfall (and this is why I probably won't offer to knit any more!).

Three rods! (one of the right is a bit wonky though)

If I remember correctly, once the whole project is finished and assembled (around November), it will be on display at the Moorfields eye hospital in London (or the Institute of Ophthalmology), with a brief stint at a nearby gallery. Hooray of geeky knitting, I want more!