First up, great excitement on the book front. Do please give Books Are Cool a quick look. You’ll see that I’ve published a free book on Smashwords, now that I’ve finally got to grips with the formatting required to upload your material to the Meatgrinder that converts it.  So grab yourself a copy of Oh Gran! in whatever ebook format you prefer.

Retrieving lost sheep keeps you fit, believe me!

On to non-booky but equally weighty matters. Recent guests at the gite left us a packet of Weight Watchers lemon cupcake mix. Yum! I decided to make that up today. I don’t buy diet products. None of us here at Les Fragnes need them. It’s amazing how chasing sheep, rounding up wandering poultry, chopping wood, gardening, maintaining lakes and  springcleaning the gite from top to bottom once a week on changeover day keeps you fit. Oh, not forgetting the daily cycle rides and increasingly chilly swims in the pool. We need our nosh in this house. Calories are our friends. Plus that slight extra layer of blubber, should there be one, helps keep the Creuse winter out.

 

 

 

But I thought I’d give these cupcakes a go. I opened the packet and discovered 12 of the tiniest cupcake cases I’d ever seen. They were petit fours cases. I looked at the box again. I’d missed the word ‘mini’ in relation to the cupcakes first time round. But mini? These were microscopic. I began to make up the cake mix as directed, adding 30 ml of water to the contents. This left me with a teeny tiny smear of cake batter in the bottom of the bowl. This wasn’t food for farmers, or anyone really, and it certainly wasn’t worth putting in the oven.

I stashed the micro-cupcake-cases into the drawer for a rainy day and improvised with the cake mix. I chucked in another 300 or so grams of flour and added a good slosh of milk, full fat of course. Then for good measure I opened the packet of icing mix that came in the kit, and which was substantially bigger than the cake mix packet, and threw that in too. I stirred it all for a while, poured it into a pie dish and cooked it until it was nice and golden.  Much better.

Now, this is something worth eating!

Mini cupcakes makeover!