The little things. Tasks that were not tasks, but turned into them.

So it's proving to be quite difficult to find the time, along with a group of people for whom to create Beryl's traditional sponge cake. But I'm working on it.

In the mean time I have made small achievements in the kitchen that were not intended to be tasks, but ended up being quite suitable to include.

The first was hot cross buns. These were fairly easy to make but the best bit was that I was able to choose the fruit that I wanted to go in. Peel certainly did not get a look in. I realize that this means they are not  really traditional, but they tasted alright. The random star one on the end in the picture is actually meant to be a Union Jack. In honor of the royal wedding.

The second achievement was making baked doughnuts. Also not the traditional version (as there was no deep frying involved), but I think dietitians have to make the ethical choice sometimes. Ethical as in won't contribute as much to heart disease. So these little doughnuts were really fun to make and turned out to be really rather cute! Dan was especially pleased to discover that some were jam filled... using jam from Task 1, of course. I definitely will make these again, but I also think at some stage down the track it would be the noble thing to do to make the more traditional version.

The third little win I had was with my friend Tara on a cold Autumn's evening. After Papa and I harvested about 50 kilograms of pumpkins from the garden, I straight away texted Tara to see if she wanted to come over and make the pumpkin pie we had been dreaming about during the week. She said 'yep', so we got under way. Both of us were a wee bit shocked when we had to tip almost a full jar of maple syrup into the mixture (eek!)... but the result was well worth it. We ended up with a very, very decent pumpkin pie, plus a few baby pies in ramekins... there was some left over mixture. We ate the pie sitting around the fireplace with warm cups of tea in our hands. A fine way to spend a chilly New England evening.

And that's all for now. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with the goods on Beryl's sponge soon.