Chocolate Pumpkin Cake

We still had several pieces of the roasted pumpkin left in the fridge today, so I made it into a chocolate pumpkin cake with chocolate glazing. The taste of the cake is predominantly chocolate, the pumpkin is there for moisture and texture. If Alex was not so averse to nuts and raisins, I would have added some to the cake too, I love my cakes full of stuff :)

Ingredients 

• 320 g roasted pumpkin
• 2 eggs
• 200 g sugar
• 80 g sunflower oil
• 220 g flour
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 10 g baking powder
  

Beat the eggs with the sugar and the oil. Add the roasted pumpkin and mix. Gradually add the flour, mixed with the cocoa powder and the baking powder.  The resulting batter is fairly viscous and sticky. Pour it in a  baking form and bake in a preheated oven at 180C until a toothpick, stuck in the center of the cake, comes out dry.

Alternatively you can pour the batter into muffin forms and bake the cake into muffins - this mixture should produce about 20 average size muffins.

Let the cake completely cool and then make the chocolate glazing. I melted 50 g of milk chocolate over boiling water, added 20 g milk and 10 g butter and generously poured the melted glaze over the cake.

Serve with coffee or tea and enjoy!

Tropical

My latest dyeing was inspired by the YouTube channels of two lovely ladies I've been following for several months - Rebeca's Chemknit's Tutorials and Jessica L'Heureux.

: After soaking the yarn for an hour, I placed it in my dyeing pot, where the water with citric acid was at the point of boiling. I had prepared three solutions of yellow, orange and red (which turned to be more magenta than red really, it came from an egg dyeing tablet, not my usual acid dye). I poured 2/3 of each cup of dye along the sides of the pot, trying to assign one third of the pot for each dye.

: After the dye had been exhausted I added the remaining 1/3 of each cup to fill in the gaps, trying to cover most of the yarn with dye.

: After all of the dye had been absorbed by the yarn, I took the yarn out of the pot and let it cool off for a while. In the meantime I added more citric acid to the pot and 1/4 cup of black dye.

: I made two knots in the dyed skein to provide some resist, took a deep breath and dipped the yarn into the black dye

: The result is this colorful skein, with some of the yellow, orange and magenta of the initial dyeing preserved due to the resist knots, plus the new colors from the black glazing - purple, green and brown.

: To me this speaks tropical and I love it! I'm eager to explore further the possibilities of this dyeing method.

: I've already cast on a pair of socks - Hermione's everyday socks, a free and very popular pattern on Ravelry: