dog songs | seeded mini muffins

It's usually when I'm on holiday that I try to read more, not just novels, but also poems. They are somehow less self conscious than books; often more difficult to unravel, but more honest. On some previous blog posts I shared quotes by poet Mary Oliver. I think that I, like many people, loved the way she could make emotion and nature somehow intertwine. I saw quite a lot of her poems were inspired by her dogs, one called Percy, or walks she'd taken with her pups. She even wrote a whole compilation of poetry, Dog Songs, that reflects on the love of a dog and their human. I have often written about my own pups, but not dogs as dogs. What having a little furry thing with a leathery nose and big beating heart means. It was global dog day a while ago (August 26th) so I was thinking about pets as a whole. They can teach you so much. About the giving and receiving of love, about loss, about humor, about snuggles. They can teach you that it's not always about the bigger picture, but sometimes the minutiae are worth your time. I could write more about this, but I found a poem Mary Oliver had written about her relationship with Percy that kind of encapsulates loving a dog and learning from one.

There is always a bittersweet edge that comes with owning a dog, like a low mist rolling off the sea, sinking into valleys in the countryside where it can linger for days. Dogs’ lives seem so short, beauty like a sunset, snowfall, city lights from airplane windows. But. They just bring so much. They make our lives so full. They transform the way you think and the way you act and any kindness of humans pales in comparison to the tireless kindness of dogs. All the worrying you do and the rushing to get home to them and the cleaning dog hair and muddy paws is really nothing, compared to what they give us.
Mary Oliver's poem is called, quite perfectly, The Sweetness of Dogs.

“What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. Full tonight.
So we go, and the moon rises, 
so beautiful it makes me shudder, 
makes me think about time and space, 
makes me take measure of myself: 
one iota pondering heaven. 

Thus we sit, I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh!
How rich it is to love the world. 
Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. 
As though I were his perfect moon.”

Mary Oliver, Swan

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seeded mini muffins

makes around 24 mini muffs, 12 regular

1 1/4c (125g) oat flour
1c brown rice flour (120g)
1/4c (108g) flax meal
1/4c (35g) sunflower seeds
1/4c mixed small seeds (60ml by volume - chia, flax, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds etc)
1tsp baking soda
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp nutmeg
1c (250ml) plain yogurt
2 free range eggs
1/4c (60ml) olive oil
1/2c (125ml) honey or maple syrup
1tsp pure vanilla extract

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Preheat the oven to 180’c, 350’f. Prepare a mini muffin pan, or a regular pan, whichever you have.
Stir together the dry ingredients, including the seeds.
In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, yogurt, vanilla and maple/honey. 
Stir the wet mix into the dry mix and spoon into muffin tins.
If making mini muffs, bake for 15-18 minutes. For regular muffins they will probably need 5-10 minutes more. 

The muffins will keep well in the fridge for around five days and you can also freeze them.

💗some other sweet muffins 💗

free and wild | peach + honey muffins

Prune girl,

What do you think about when you lie on your back, all four paws in the air and teeth showing, like your pretty face is caught in a grin? You can switch from deep slumber to paws-up in a second. In that deepest, most peaceful sleep, do you drift through pale pink clouds and run through long grass, wet with dew, chasing endless rabbits, barrelling through small streams and forests filled with butterflies? Is baby sister Suzi by your side as you run, always fast, but never fast enough to catch the rabbit, so your dream can go on and on? Do you dream that there’s a farmhouse in a green valley, with stone walls the color of honeycomb and roses climbing on trellises; with warm wood floors and soft beds for you to sink into after your chases? What are you thinking about when you’re dozing in the garden with the gulls screeching above you as they come in from the sea? Can you smell the ocean salt mingling with the inland breezes, bringing in visions of ships and barges and adventure, as you lie on the patio and sniff the air? Or are you thinking of the pheasants, roaming the countryside, running through wheat fields and pastures dotted with cows, where farm dogs roam, free and wild? Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be them?

And what goes on in that head of yours when you’re napping quietly on a blanket and Suzi clumsily lies down, right next to you, maybe touching you? You have a really beautiful head, Prune girl, maybe more greyhound-like than the chunky, soulful faces of your Labrador cousins. But you’re not particularly impressed by all that closeness, are you? You know baby sister means well, so you wait, maybe a minute, then you heave a tortured sigh and go sleep elsewhere, a couple of meters away. You seem to have learned that people, and Suzi, mean well when they come to fawn over you, and they should be tolerated, at least for some amount of time. It is just so hard to tell what you’re thinking. Sometimes you seem to be embraced by a silent gray cloud of melancholy, your big amber eyes seem to drift so far away. From living with you we know it’s too simple to say dogs can’t ponder the past. Do you think of the friends you grew up with, your mother, those you lost? Your pups that are all grown up now, or the tiny pup that didn’t make it; who you kept returning to your bed to look for, long after he had faded away. We know you worry, often too much.

But we also know you can feel uninhibitedly happy. Is that how you feel when you gallop out of the wire gate in the morning when I hold it open before a walk? Are you thinking about the rabbits you’ll see as you drag one of your preferred humans through the tangled summer grass? And those small jumps you do, on the spot, when one of the preferred humans come home. It’s like your whole body is consumed by a bouncy spring. Your uncanny ability to sniff out all kinds of human foods, and to ignore anything remotely healthy. You know we’ll always give in; that we’ll take the mundane dog food out of your silver bowl, we’ll find a snack, you’ll grab it and run over to the rug in the living room, as sunshine streams through the windows and a sleepy Suzi naps. Because despite the fact you’ve been with us for almost all of your ten years, you will always know us far better than we’ll know you. You will always be a mystery, with your unreadable eyes the color of leaves after an Indian summer; your tentative cuddliness, and warm charcoal fur.

“the secrets inside her mind are like flowers in a garden at night time, filling the darkness with perfume”
- Fumiko Enchi

Happy birthday to Prune angel. One of my many nicknames for her is Pruney muffin, so here are some muffins, almost as sweet as our girl. This is a very simple muffin formula that I think would work well with any stone fruits, or any fruit/berry in other seasons. I hope you try them.
If you scroll down to the end of this post, there are some sweet photos of Pruney recently, doing aaalll the Labrador things.
Love you ❤️

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peach + honey muffins

1/2c (60g) brown rice flour
1/2c (50g) oat flour
1/2c (50g) almond meal
2T flax meal*
1tsp baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda
1/2tsp salt
1/3c (80ml) honey
2 free range eggs
1/4c (60ml) olive oil
2/3c (160ml) milk of choice
1/2T apple cider vinegar
1tsp pure vanilla extract
1 heaped cup chopped peaches

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Preheat the oven to 180’c, 350’f and line/oil a muffin tin.
Measure your milk of choice into a mug or measuring cup. Add the 1/2T apple cider vinegar, stir and set aside as you continue with the rest of the recipe. You can also use 2/3c buttermilk instead.
In a large bowl, stir together the flours, flax meal, baking powder/soda and salt. In a smaller bowl, beat the eggs with the oil. Add honey, vanilla and the milk-vinegar mix.
Gently toss the sliced peaches in the dry ingredients, which should help stop the fruits from sinking. Then add the wet ingredients, gently stir together until the batter is smooth with only a few visible streaks of flour.
Spoon into the muffin tray. Bake for 18-20 minutes, until a skewer inserted through the muff comes out clean. You can also make mini muffs, but they won’t need as long in the oven so keep an eye on them.
The muffins will keep well for around 4 days on the counter, but will freeze/defrost nicely.

*If you’re not looking to make these muffins gluten free, feel free to use 1 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour (or spelt flour) instead, no need for the flax meal. These muffs aren’t super fussy, unlike Pruney princess in these photos below.

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inward restlessness | chocolate + almond snack cake

There are times when you do more travelling than other times. Perhaps this is obvious, but travelling isn’t always a physical state, rather a state of mind. An inherent inward restlessness, wandering thoughts. When you see something that has been there every day but is really someplace else. The earliest sprigs of white tree blossom along the highway; a smoggy stretch of road between a few Norfolk towns, but not always. They seem to exist in two separate spaces, coexistence in a chaotic internal harmony. The same skies, a pebbly gray; dense, tactile cloud; watery sunshine and a lingering dampness. But this is France, somewhere on the A10 autoroute, after Paris, perhaps direction Orléans, heading south, where the air is milder and there are more green buds on trees. 

Recently I think we have had tropical rain on our minds. The real rain, that falls in crystalline sheets from towering cloud the color of a twilight sky. Pool water. Hot rain, chubby droplets, rippling the pool’s surface and distorting your view of the tiles lining the bottom. That strange similarity of being underwater and coming up for air, only to have warm rain drops in your face. Air conditioning that felt even colder on damp skin and hair as we watched the rusted trucks of the tropics turn rubble roads into rivers of muddy rainwater.

Perhaps it is because it’s easier being anywhere other than where you really have to be. There are no real feelings, no sense of time, in that dream like state. Just glimpses of places and people both completely frozen and very animate. Because slowly the line between those travels in your head and the trips you actually take becomes very blurred. So travel becomes your constant state, and you are everywhere but nowhere, all at once. 

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls” - Anais Nin 

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Hello again :) It’s been a while since I last posted but I am back, with cake. A simple chocolate cake based on a recipe for a deeply chocolatey almond cake I tried while visiting our grandparents over the holidays . I’m not sure when a cake becomes a snack cake but this little guy is very simple to make, kind of virtuous and also just a great chocolate cake for any day. It is good to have around since it keeps well for a while, too. I hope you try it.
Also, I appreciate you coming back to visit this space after every time I disappear.
Much love xx

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Chocolate + almond snack cake

1 cup almond meal
1/2 cup natural cocoa powder
1/2tsp basking soda
1/2tsp salt
4 free range eggs
1/2c honey
1/4c plain yogurt of choice (or applesauce)
1tsp pure vanilla extract 

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Preheat the oven to 170’C, 340’F*.
Prepare an 8inch round cake pan - even if it is non-stick I usually use a little coconut oil and line the bottom of the pan to be suuure the cake won’t stick.
In a large bowl, stir together the almond meal, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt until the cocoa powder is fully mixed through the flour.
In another large bowl, beat together all remaining ingredients until they’re fully combined and the mixture is smooth. If you have a stand mixer or a hand mixer and a large bowl, this would be really quick.
Combine wet and dry ingredients until the batter is dark brown and smooth. Since there is no gluten don’t worry about over-mixing, a flexible spatula is useful.
Pour the batter into your prepared pan. 
Bake 30-35 minutes until a skewer inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. You won’t want to bake this cake too long, it will lose some of its charm if it’s too dry.

This cake will keep well for about a week in the fridge in an airtight container.

Tiny has appointed herself kitchen assistant