In the Month of May

May is a lovely time of year.  In the field behind our garden the little black-and-white lambs race up and down, and the fledgling birds are out of the nest and being fed by their parents on the lawn and on the shed roof.  The baby blue-tits sit on the shed roof and flutter their little wings wildly like humming-birds as their parents approach with tasty morsels in their beaks  - it's just gorgeous to watch.  The house-martins are back too, with their little forked tails and white bellies flashing in the evening sun as they swoop into their nests in the eaves.  It won't be long until they have their babies and I can lie in bed on sunny weekend mornings listening to the little liquid burbles and chirrups coming from the nest above the bedroom window.

Alas, however, it is not a lovely sunny May day - like practically every day for what seems like years it is a filthy, grey, rainy day, which also means I'm stuck inside writing about lovely sunny May days when I'd like to be out gardening in one.  But, never fear, there's an unfailingly successful recipe for happy pottering when it's grey and rainy outside...baking!  This could be seen as an act of masochism, seeing as I've just started a healthy-eating programme, but I do genuinely love baking.  It's just so cosy...this morning I reprised my Bumper Oat Cookies, with some alterations - I left out the spices and fruit and introduced some dark chocolate into the equation - and made what I'm calling my Experimental Pear Cake. 

I don't know what the cookies taste like, as I incredibly virtuously didn't even sample any cookie-dough, but they look very pretty with their little chocolate edges.  Here they are in their un-edged state...

...with their little edges setting...

...and waiting to be eaten.

Alastair had some people from a gallery at the house this morning to look at his work, so I laid the cookies out with a nice tray.  The cat supervised.

As for the cake, I had two past-their-best pears in the fruit bowl, one egg left in the fridge and a Waitrose recipe for Dorset Apple Cake.  With this motley collection of chance occurrences I made a rather nice-loooking pear upside-down cake.

The recipe was unusual, in that you made a crumble-mix of butter, flour mixed spice and sugar and then mixed it to a paste with a beaten egg, so I'm looking forward to seeing what a little piece tastes like as a weekend treat!

Experimental Pear Cake Update
Delicious - an intriguing mix of scone and cake, with the lovely spicy flavour complimenting the pear perfectly.  Would be good hot with cream!