Pide with Savory and Sesame

I'm definitely into bread-making this year. Here's another successful recipe I came upon quite by chance while looking for something else - this is Turkish flatbread Pide with savory and sesame.
The products: 450 g all purpose flour, 250 ml warm water, 7 g dry yeast, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 3 tbsp oil.
For the glazing: 1 egg yolk, dry savory and sesame.

Mix all products in a bowl, make a soft dough and leave to rest and double its volume. Divide into three balls, spread flat and place in a baking tin. Leave for 10 min. to rest. Make small holes with your finger, glaze with egg yolk, spread with savory and sesame.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the crust turns gold brown.

Served with feta cheese and tomato salad these pides were eaten in no time :)))

And just a sneak peek at my finished Aria tunic, I'll have to organize a photo shooting these days.

Medieval Fair in Boyana Church

Just a few snapshots of the Medieval Fair, held in the yard of the Boyana Church at the beginning of the month. It was well visited and I hope they gathered enough proceeds to organize a bigger event in September, as planned.

To my surprise :), I enjoyed a lot the medieval music
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDqda4QcPgA)

The fair featured medieval games, weapons and drinks:

The key of the program was the lecture on medieval warfare and the demonstrations of knights' battles:

At the end we tried our hands at bow shooting - Gaby was amazing and won the cheering and applause of the crowd, hubby was very good, I was a sorry picture, missing all of my shots :)))

Zebra Cake

Here's another brilliant idea I'm sharing with you today - the Zebra cake. I'm not sure who's the original author of the recipe, I saw a reference to it today in a forum and felt the familiar urge to try it immediately.
When I come upon such simple but spectacular ideas I feel like a person, walking along the road, rolling a square wheel and coming upon a guy, rolling a round wheel. Facepalm! How did it never occur to me before!

Follows the recipe as I made it just a couple of hours ago. I modified the quantity ratio of the ingredients to my family's taste - sweeter and less oily, you might prefer it otherwise.

Ingredients:

4 eggs

300 g sugar

300 ml milk

300 g flour

60 g oil

10 g baking powder

25 g cocoa powder

10 g instant coffee

Mix the eggs with the sugar until frothy, add the oil, the milk and the flour, sifted together with the baking powder. Divide the mixture into two bowls and add the cocoa and coffee (the latter is optional, I just like the subtle taste of coffee) into the second bowl. Prepare a round baking tin, covering it with baking paper, or oil and flour.

Now comes the fun part. Pour a ladle of the white mixture in the center of the tin. Then pour a ladle of the brown mixture in the center of the white mixture. Continue alternating the mixtures. The amazing part - you don't have to do anything to make them spread into concentrated circles - the viscose fluid nature of the cake mixture takes care of that. All you have to do is just pour a ladle of the mixture into the center and it will gradually spread to cover the tin.

My ladle-fuls were not perfectly equal, but that's part of the unique stripes of this zebra :)
Bake in a preheated oven at 180C until the toothpick test indicates the cake is ready.

I'm sure your family and friends will be amazed by your cooking skills if you treat them to that cake :)

Enjoy!

Plastic Decals and Knitting

Yesterday in a popular Bulgarian crafting forum I came upon this amazing blog and the ingenious idea for iron on decals from plastic bags.
As everybody else, I have some old and rather simple cotton T-shirts at home that could benefit from a decal. So I took out three tops, that are still in circulation and one I had allocated for the recycle bin, for the initial experiments,

and an assortment of plastic bags:

The first tries were a failure - the plastic cuttings stuck to the parchment paper, then to the xerox paper. I read the comments under the blog post and there were other people with my problem too, and the people who had done the transfer successfully claimed that they used American parchment paper. Then it occurred to me that my new roll of baking paper was actually different from the previous rolls I've used - it is brown and not so transparent. So, I found a small piece from the old roll - white and semi-transparent and voila - the transfer was a success!

The transfers on the grey 100% T-shirt, using cuttings from LDPE 04 bag were OK -

On this photo the settings of my iron are No steam and Max temp, but further I lowered the temp a bit to Cotton settings.

Then I tried to transfer a flower cutting from the thinner bag to a 95% cotton and 5% elastic top - total fiasco :(

All my further tries were failures - thinner plastics shriveled and deformed and thicker plastics fell of the elastic textiles (I tried 95% cotton and 5% lycra and 100% corded cotton).

In conclusion - I don't consider my experiment a success, but I wanted to share it with you, if you are interested to try it yourself.

And a glimpse to my current knitting project - a self-designed summer sweater with 3/4 sleeves. This is the texture I came up with:

So far I've got the front and half of the back - slowly, but steadily it keeps my hands busy :)