At ground level

From the 24 bus

Near Victoria

Westminster Cathedral

Winter wonderland?

"The temperature is more like May than December," said someone on the radio. Outdoor ice rinks are struggling to get the ice cold enough ... this one is outside the Natural History Museum -

 The lights on the trees look very midwinterish though -

2015 journal quilts done

The final four have been posted to the Contemporary Quilt yahoogroup (others here and here) -

and the naming convention has been observed; it's part of the rules to name them so that the maker and month can be identified, but a surprising number of people seem unable to do this, and leave the name their camera gives the images. Not good.

When it came to taking a photo of all 12, I became indecisive - 6x2? - and which should go where? -

 Or does 4x3 work better for the 12"x6" format? -

 Shucks, why dither? The first photo taken works as well as any -

(Linked to Off the Wall Friday.)

Tis the season...

...to be baking! My efforts this year include, left to right in the photo, Vanillehörnchen, Husarenkrapfen, Haselnussringen, and Schokoladenschäumchen, recipes from a German cookbook first published in 1911 that belonged to my mother. I don't think she used it much - her favourite was Dr.Oetker. But it does have over 100 cookie/biscuit/Plätzchen/Kekse recipes, and another section on cakes - rich pickings!

The recipe for Vanillehörnchen is here. Shortbread with ground almonds, and not too sweet, they are our default xmas cookies.

Husarenkrapfen - hussar's doughnuts - are this year's discovery - they melt in the mouth, and the speck of jam gives them zing.

Haselnussringen should, or could, be cut with a ring cutter, but I had to make do with a round cutter with an interesting edge. If you can get hold of coarse sugar to sprinkle on top, all the better.

Schokoladenschäumchen - chocolate meringues - are "under development" at my place. They need to be small so that they dry out and are crispy - what I thought were small shapes turned out to expand rather in the baking; the soft centres were very chewy and the outsides extremely crunchy.

It's amazing how many different results can be had with various combinations of butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and additions of nuts, chocolate, etc. My project is to bake more of these "lost" recipes ... lost to me, without my mother around to bake them, but very much alive on www.chefkoch.de - 275,000 recipes (not all for cookies, of course; check out the tempting photos).

Husarenkrapfen (hussar's doughnuts)

150g butter

65g sugar, including a tsp vanilla sugar

2 egg yolks, plus an extra one* for brushing (optional)

160g flour

about 2Tbsp (raspberry) jam

Cream the butter, beat in the sugar and egg yolks, then add flour. Make little balls (slightly smaller than a walnut) with the dough and dent the tops with your finger or a thimble. Let stand in a cool place or the fridge for 1-2 hours.

Brush with the extra egg yolk*, put a tiny bit of jam in the indentation, and bake in a moderate oven (350F, 180C, gas 4) for 30 minutes. Makes about 30.

*Alternatively, dust with icing sugar once the biscuits have cooled.

Haselnussringchen (hazelnut rings)

250g butter

250g sugar

2 eggs plus one yolk

500g flour

90g ground hazelnuts

Cream the butter, add other ingredients one at a time. Let the dough rest for an hour, then roll out 1/3cm (1/8") thick and cut, preferably with ring shaped cutter. Spread with a beaten egg yolk and sprinkle with chopped hazelnuts and Hagelzucker (coarse granulated sugar). Bake at moderate heat (350F, 180C, gas 4) for about 30 minutes, till golden. Makes about 60.

Schokoladenschmäumchen (little chocolate meringues)

2 medium egg whites (60g)

10g vanilla sugar

340g icing sugar (270g plus 70g)

80g dark chocolate

30 g cocoa

Grate the chocolate on a medium grater and set aside. Beat the egg whites till stiff, then beat in the 10g vanilla sugar and sift in the 270g icing sugar. Mix in the grated chocolate and sift in the cocoa.

Put the 70g icing sugar on a board (or the counter) and onto it the mixture; flatten the mixture to 3/4 cm thick, then cut into small (2 – 3 cm) shapes. Lay the shapes onto a buttered baking tray, leaving 2cm between them and let stand for 1-2 hours to dry. 

Bake in a low oven (275F, 140C, gas 1) for 1-1½ hours; it’s more drying than actual baking. Wait 5 mins before removing them from the baking tray.

Makes about 50, depending on the size of your shapes.

Using two chunks of empty time

Eyes shut - on the left, on a tube journey, some blind drawing - from the imagination (tea set) and then in patterns, switching the mind's eye between keeping track of the pattern and keeping track of where on the page the pen might be - a process that might get easier with practice?

Eyes open - on the right, hanging around the V&A, a hasty observational drawing of a marble carving. My pen started in the middle, or rather with the helmet above the shield, and as I worked outward the other details emerged. It was surprising that th piece wasn't symmetrical, and it was very surprising to find the eagle in the background!

Once past the nice little helmet I didn't find the rest particularly congenial - the carved leaves within the scrolled sides were particularly hard to find the edges of and keep in proportion, and then all those shaggy feathers on the little eagle could have been fiddly - but what fun to discover that the lumps at the bottom were bird's feet with talons, and those side bits were feathers, and finally the fierce head of the eagle - all these details had been buried in the monochrome of the marble. Eyes very open now!

Downtown, last week

New Bond Street

No.7 at 46

Monstrous goings on

Tasty ceramics at ...?Nicole Farhi

Timelessness

"Seasonal" high jinks

Just a gate

Quiet mews

"Make rugs not war" - yes

Berkeley Square

The new Gagosian Gallery

... and its gorgeous end-grain oak floor (bad photo though)

Drawing Tuesday - Grant Museum of Zoology

The delightful Grant Museum of Zoology is open only in the afternoons. We made the effort, and all felt it was worth it - and worth returning to.

The museum was rehoused in what used to be the medical library

Where to start? Anywhere! My choice of specialisation for the day was puffer fish, and it was the interplay of spikes and shadows that caught my eye -

 The porcupine fish is related to actual puffer fish; it has spikes even when not inflated, whereas for puffer fish (Tetraodontids) the spikes only appear when they inflate.

They have several lines of defense, the spikes being one of them; another is a neurotoxin that results from some of the bacteria in their guts, with is reportedly a thousand times more lethal than cyanide.

Puffer and his little friend porcupine

I lost patience with the spikes; whereas this (on the museum's tumblr account) is a very different drawing of the creature, quite charming, but without the spikes in evidence.

Lured by the long rows of dolphin teeth -

and the skull of a howler monkey nearby, I got to know them through tracing a photo on the ipad, looking closely at the photo, then doing a reality check to revise and to fill in missing (or conjectured) details -

Not - definitely not - as congenial as drawing with a pencil, but after you've engaged with what the photo shows and tuned in to what you might be seeing, it's easier to look (through the glass, past the reflections, into the shadows...) and re-evaluate what you see.

Also the ipad was very useful for taking closeups of some of the glass sponges on display -

An organism made of 90% silica

as well as this wonderful Victorian tableau, borrowed from the vaults of the Natural History Museum for the "Glass Delusions" exhibition -

Now the day's drawings. 

Janet B's pangolin

... and her goat's head

Sue's aardwolf and lion

Marina's careful skeleton and abstracted creatures

Joyce couldn't find a label explaining what this is

Janet identified a rhamphorynchus (prehistoric flying reptile)

... and also found the museum's collection of plastic toy dinosaurs!

(via)

We'll be back...

A last look at the Ai Wei Wei exhibition