Cooking

I made a successful pear torte by scaling down a recipe from It's Raining Plums according to the ingredients I had available: 2oz ground almonds, 2oz butter, 2oz sugar, 2oz flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder to make it 'self-raising' (didn't seem to have much effect so maybe I should have used more), half a teaspoon of cinnamon and half an egg, a.k.a. one of my chickpea water emergency ice cubes (again, it might perhaps have risen more if I'd had more liquid -- but then I had a disproportionately high proportion of pear already), all cooked in a 6-inch tin instead of an eight-inch one. The recipe describes it as 'a shallow cake', so I assume that the topping/base was only ever meant to spread out rather than rising, but it probably shouldn't have been so crumbly....

I also found my mysteriously-missing cooking scissors, which were reposing in the bottom of one of my cycle panniers where I had put them in preparation for an expedition to pick elderberries back in August which was frustrated by what would ultimately prove to be the terminal malfunction of said bike :-(