Playing with Dolls

My knitting and sewing these last days felt very much like playing with dolls. Actually dolls were the first recipients of my knitting and sewing efforts, as I suppose is the case with 90% of the knitting population :) I was younger than five years of age when I pestered my mother to teach me to knit, so that I could make clothes for my dolls, the same as she was making for my new born baby sister.

So, as I've mentioned before on the blog, Gaby has a friend, who has a very small mini Yorkshire terrier. Two years ago I knitted her a couple of sweaters, but now she's a grown lady and was in need of new clothes. This is the first of the new sweaters - a simple 2x2 rib striped sweater, made with the same yarn to go with the hat for the girlfriend. For fun I used the random stripe generator to program the sequence of the stripes. The pattern I followed is basically my first dog sweater pattern, only I added four more stitches to account for the rib texture.

Pattern: Lizzy Dog Sweater
Yarn: Alize Lanagold Solids (coral and grey), Alize Superlana (white in two threads)
Needle: 4 mm
Time to knit: two days

And on a quite different note - last night I made the apple pie that is becoming the talk on Bulgarian culinary blogland. I had read all the comments and I thought I was prepared for what to expect and still I was smitten with the result. Yes, smitten, because in the course of the preparation I was gradually filling with doubts and at the end I was sure I had misunderstood the recipe - it all looked like too much dry ingredients and nothing to hold them together. So, to be on the safe side, I also made my ordinary dry fruit cake with honey:

After baking, the apple pie looked nothing much, but when we tasted it - oh, my! - it is worth every pray and song!!! Crusty and juicy, sweet and tasty, and so easy to make (especially if you ask your husband to grate the apples :)))

A quick summary of the recipe:
You need: 1 kg of apples, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of wheat semolina, 1 cup of sugar, 1 tea spoon of cinnamon, 100 g of walnuts, 10 g of baking soda, 125 g of butter (there's also a vegetarian version with cocoa butter).
Grate the apples and mix them with the cinnamon and the walnuts. Mix the dry ingredients. Alternate apple and dry ingredient layers in a baking dish, adding two-three spoons of melted butter, finish with a layer of the dry ingredients and the remaining butter. Bake at 180C for 40 minutes. Spread powder sugar on top. Best enjoyed on the next day!