Mmmmmm More Cake!

As before, my excuse is............ I won the loaf pan liners and now I need to use them!

This one is from The WI cook book....Best Kept Secrets of the W.I. Cakes and Biscuits

Chocolate Brownie Loaf Cake

150g butter
50g plain chocolate
200g brown sugar
2 eggs
vanilla essence
50g plain flour + 1 tsp baking powder
150g milk chocolate chopped (optional)

Melt the butter and dark chocolate in a bowl over simmering hot water.
Put the sugar, eggs and a few drops of vanilla essence in a bowl and whisk them really well together until foamy. Fold in the flour and baking powder carefully. Then stir in the melted butter and chocolate mixture (optional stir in the chopped chocolate).
Pour mixture into lined 2lb loaf tin.
Bake at Gas 4/180C/160C fan oven for 40 - 55 minutes until the cake is firm and skewer comes out clean (cover with foil for the last 15 minutes if it starts to burn).
Remove from oven and leave in tin for 10 minutes before cooling on wire rack.

This is very delicious and is firm enough to be cut into very thin slices......but why would you!

Back Tomorrow
Sue

First Harvest

Best thing about having a garden and growing things to eat?

It's harvesting the first of the year.

Delicious pink forced rhubarb.............I made a crumble.

(Writing this has made me a remember a long ago friend who wouldn't cover rhubarb to force it because it was "unnatural"!)

Many thanks for comments yesterday. Blogger was playing up when I tried to reply to some comments. Internet connection kept disconnecting too. If I vanish that will be why.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

On Track

Last week I heard the noise of big machinery across the field and guessed it was things to do with the Heritage Railway Track Extension and as the weather on Saturday was better than the forecast  I took my new walking shoes to have a look.

Sure enough here is the new  end of the Middy Railway. Its just quarter of a mile from home. They wanted to put a big turntable in here to turn the trains round to run back to the station. But with this new ending to the railway being just  50 metres from houses and as the railway didn't own the land they needed, they couldn't get permission, which I'm quite pleased about for the sake of the people who live there. Because it would have meant lots of people getting off the train to watch the turntable going round and probably wandering about the lane by their houses which would be quite a change from how their lane is at present.

This "new destination" 1km from the museum is to be called Aspal Halt. Heavens knows why as the village of Aspal is several miles away! The railway museum has an open day on the 21st April then their Middy in the War Years weekend on 5th and 6th May. I expect they are hoping to have the sleepers and  rails laid by then - depends on the weather I guess.

  This is where we picked loads of blackberries in 2017, now all cleared for the railway extension

Here's what was making all the noise

 I don't know how I feel about this, it was a lovely path (although not an official footpath)down the old track-bed, now its stones ready for sleepers and rails

There is a footpath crossing the railway here not sure how that will be sorted out

This is where the railway used to end

And the other way shows where it will be going - up hill a little, so I expect to hear the little trains huffing and puffing up the slope every Sunday through the summer.

Other machinery I might have been hearing was this, it's a willow cutter

 And here are the bundles ready to be collected

 I'm glad they haven't removed the cherry-plum tree -  blossom just beginning to appear.

 Heading home...........this is the footpath where  boots get caked in mud after rain, and that cream house is my cottage at the end of a lane.

Lovely lot of primroses this year on my meadow, among the new trees.

Thank you for all the comments about the random odd blog yesterday.

Back Tomorrow
Sue