Cheesecake brownies (bonus three recipes in one)

I've been meaning to make cheesecake brownies for a few years. I've a great recipe for brownies from Chocolate Cookery (you'll have to look this one up on abebooks) and an equally great recipe for white chocolate cheesecake. Others have combined these before with much success, so it was my turn to have a go off them.

Delicious cinnamon snails!

It took me a while to realise I liked cinnamon. I think I must have been in my late teens when it hit me that this stuff is AMAZING. A wonderful warm flavour that goes great with apples, or better yet, some sugar and butter and little else.

Further adventures in biscuit land

I love a good shortbread so I do. It's quick enough to make, and the buttery delight means it's hard to make shortbread that doesn't taste good. People always go on about shortbread being quick enough to make if guests suddenly arrive and you want to show off / not go to the shop for biscuits, but seriously, who does actually do that. I just make it on a whim, so the lads in college will be in for a treat tomorrow, lucky folks.

The recipe was derived from a barely remembered (misremembered?) ratio of 3 parts flour to 2 parts butter to 1 part sugar. It's VERY buttery, so if you don't like buttery shortbread you won't like this (also, how can you not like buttery shortbread). It's a simpler cousin of this recipe, it's not as delicate and fragile, an altogether more robust shortbread than can survive the trip to work.

Boxer the Bear

As you may know, I'm a crocheter at heart.  Since I learned to crochet, I essentially gave up knitting and can't go back.  However, I've taken to machine knitting as a way to still knit without the fiddly hassle....

I was recently given a Bond Classic knitting machine and have been making squares and handbags on it.  I got it into my head that I'd like to make a teddy bear, but struggled to find patterns online, so I came up with one.  As both sides of the bear need to be the same, I have actually documented this pattern and will reproduce it below for future reference.

A Tunisian Sampler

Being in no fit state to bake anything today or even ramble about science, I sat on the couch experimenting with some Tunisian Crochet. In Tunisian crochet, you pick up a row of stitches on to your (long) crochet hook and then cast them all off on the reverse pass of the row. By varying how you pick up the stitches, you can get a very different look.