New paintings and regular art updates.
We found an apple as green as grass on our apple tree this December just after Christmas! It was in a sheltered part of the garden and had clung on round the back of the tree. Now it’s sitting in a bowl on its own. Pride of place. We may have to pour libations onto our trees. Wassail!
Apple found in our garden in December. I wrote about it in a blog about Wassails. We joined in a virtual Wassail at the weekend and drank too much cider. People posted photos of previous years Wassails when they walked about with flaming torches around the boundaries of the parish. No threats were made but there were so many of us we had to have a police escort and cars were stopped as we wandered down the road to the Penkhull apple tree. A few jolly hours to beat back the cold and the dark. In some places in the past they used to shoot shotguns at the trees to make them flower and bear fruit. There are other traditions where they beat the trunks of Walnut trees to get them to bear fruit. We’ve never had that problem with ours. The squirrels always find enough nuts and then we have to find places far away to plant the saplings, we’ve already got too many!
You don’t normally find apples still on trees at this time of year. But this was plucked from the back of an apple tree, that sits amongst lots of bushes, this afternoon. Never found one this late in the year before.
Speaking if late apples, hubby bought home four or five little crab apples from branches overlooking the canal on his walk last weekend. I told him not to bring more home as this will be food for small animals or birds over winter.
Drink mulled cider
Dance and turn
beat the apple bough
Sing and burn
Fires to fight
And defeat the dark
Bring good fortune
To the bark.
Wassail the folk
Who sing in praise
A happy new year
And prosperity raise.
Remembered wassail
But not this time
Socially distanced
Won’t be the same.
A little bit flat, but I cooked this in a flan case.
Ingredients (approx amounts)
8oz self raising flour
4oz butter/ margarine
two tablespoonfuls sweetener (or 4oz sugar)
three eggs
two tablespoons milk
pinch of salt
large cooking apple peeled and cored
packet of raspberries.
I put the self raising flour in a bowl and then put bits of butter in plus the sweetener, then with a metal spoon I broke the fat up more, a pinch of salt, then crumbled the mix between my fingers so that it looked like breadcrumbs.
I made a dip in the mix and added the eggs, slowly stirring it in and trying to keep air in the batter, I added a bit of semi-skimmed milk to soften it more.
I added the apple slices and the raspberries to the cake batter so the fruit was evenly mixed into it. Then I poured the batter into the flan case which I had buttered.
I put the cake in an oven, gas mark 4, for 1 hour and 10 to 15 minutes.
It came out nice and moist, and it wasn’t completely cooled when we tore into it!
Note I used self raising flour that contains wheat, milk and eggs that can be allergens, butter which may not be in your diet and sweetener that you can cook with because I try to make sugar free cakes.
Just a photo I took a few days ago. A still life. I’m still ill and haven’t been out much recently, so I am thinking about what I can write about. As the saying goes, autumn is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. It would be good to get out and enjoy the world but I’m keeping my germs to myself. Its only a cold but its still irritating.
Stay safe everyone.
X
Days are getting shorter now and the fruit is getting ripe. We have plenty of pears on our tree, but of all five apple trees only one fruit. But then after weeding the allotment this morning we were allowed to get a tub of apples in exchange. Some of them are different varieties, a lot of them are a bit holey but I’m hoping they will taste nice if I stew them up or cook them in a cake. If it turns out OK I will post about it.
X
Tasty apple for lunch. There is also a saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. But why an apple in Eden? The Bible was written in the countries like Judaea which were roman provinces. The tree of life did not have a specific fruit. It didn’t say what it was in the bible. The fruit didn’t get named until later. So Apples are not evil (never thought they were). Of course you then have stories like Snow white who bit a poisoned apple and could only be revived by the kiss of a Prince. But that wasn’t the apples fault! Anyway there are lots of varieties of apples, this one was a Royal gala which was very tasty.
I just thought I would show you a close-up of the apple I drew today, so you can see the effect of layering up pencil crayon and permanent marker, black ink pen, and charcoal pencil. I enjoyed using fine lines to define the shadows. I was going to leave a patch if white paper as a highlight on the apple, but when I looked at it, it was to white. So I used orange, red and pink permanent markers to try and make the apple stand out. Using different colours and textures is really exciting, it makes the image less flat. But I’m not trying to make it 3d either.
USK Stoke day 26 challenge. Eating fruit. So I drew this wrinkly apple, balanced on my easel, then ate it… Not the easel, but the apple.
Drawn with coloured pencil crayons, charcoal stick, black ink pen and permanent marker pens.
I’m now hungry….
X
Mallaband-Brown