Late autumn

It was a beautiful, bright morning and I managed to fit in a quick walk up the hill before lunch. There's still lots of colour dotted around, but the winter shapes of the trees are becoming clear, and the valley landscape is now dominated by the dark lines of hedgerows, largely leafless apart from the mounds of ivy, and the emerging green of winter wheat in ploughed fields. 

The promised cupcakes were not quite what I had in mind. As we prepared to start, I discovered that the cable of my trusty thirty five year old hand held mixer which I use (somewhat infrequently these days) to cream sugar and butter for sponge cakes or butter icing, had been badly gnawed by mice, exposing frayed copper wire, so was clearly not safe to use. There's no sign of recent mouse activity in the cupboard, but it was invaded a few months ago, and I may well not have made a creamed cake mixture since then. I was not keen to cream either the sponge or the buttercream with a wooden spoon, perhaps because of all the early practice I gained as an eight year old when I was frequently given this job, so we substituted a muffin recipe using melted butter. This worked fine, and the muffins use less fat and sugar so are probably somewhat less unhealthy. The frosting was more challenging, but I managed to combine white chocolate, peanut butter and a bit of caramel flavour into a sticky mess which was light enough in colour to contrast with the mould Dr Who chocolates destined to decorate the cakes. It tasted good, but the photos are too embarrassingly unsightly to share!