Today is a public holiday in Germany, so you're getting a picture of a Pfingstrose instead of a blog post.



According to its name, it should be blooming this weekend, but it des not look like it will be able to make it until tonight. Its colleague in the other flower bed has bloomed last weekend  - keeping track of the calendar does not seem to be the strong suit of these plants...

I'm trying to get on top of emails, get some writing done, wrap up stuff for the preparation of the next Textile Forum, cope with the GDPR things for the Forum website, and I need to get started on the tax stuff, too. Holy Bureaucracy, be gentle with me.

So while I am doing all those things, have a gratuitous sheep picture of Valais Blacknose sheep, courtesy of my brother-in-law:

It's been way too long since I've had a proper session of tablet weaving, trying some more to figure out a good method of weaving twilled pattens without a written pattern... but somehow, there's always too little time. (Saying "yes" to too many requests, trying to organise some more workshops, going to fairs plus having to keep up and to cope with all the current bureaucratic bullshit the EU tends to throw at people does not help either.)
There's some links for you at least, though, related to tablet weaving:

Lise Raeder Knudsen has a pdf book about Gotlandish Tablet Weaves on her website, free to download. It's in Swedish, with a very short English summary, but might still be interesting to you for the (slightly grainy, black-and-white) pictures of the originals. You might also want to check out her other publications in the list, which are partly available to download.

Tablet weaving, being slightly different from "normal" weaving, is a fascinating thing all around, and I always find it interesting how differently people approach the topic, and from how many different aspects it proves to be... complicated. Case in point: the attempt to write a tabletweaving simulation, published on the Penelope blog. If you are intrigued by how tablet weaving works, check out Sarah Goslee's explanation on the String Pages, she does a wonderful job at explaining the nitty gritty inner workings. (She also has an article about this, with pictures, in Ancient Textiles, Modern Science.)

There's a new exhibition on at the University of Manchester Library, called "The Alchemy of Colour". It will be running into August, and it does look very fascinating - it's a pity I won't be able to make it, but if you are in the area and interested in colours, it might be worth a visit.

There will be a conference in Munich, at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, about Structuring Fashion -Foundation Garments Throughout History. Obviously, the emphasis is on early modern and modern history, but Beatrix Nutz will be talking abou medieval formative underwear as well. The conference takes place September 13 and 14, with additional offers for the 15th and 16th if you have the time. You can find more info and the registration link behind the link.

 
 

At the Nadelwelt, there were also opportunities to get some journals - about textile crafts, obviously, but also some lifestyle and food and drink journals, to round it all off. I happened to get one about food and drink into my hands, and of course I had to leaf through it.

That issue of the journal claimed to have the recipe for the world's best rhubarb cake. That cake featured a weird mix of shortcrust dough and yeast dough. That you were supposed to mix together until they sort of marble. Um... very, very weird.

Well. That extra weirdness aside... I happen to know the world's best rhubarb cake. Intimately. It looks like this:



There is a nice layer of fluffy, moist dough, covered with a vanilla custard layer that smoothly transitions into a lot of wonderful rhubarby rhubarb, and all that is covered with a generous layer of streusel. That, dear readers of this blog, is the world's best rhubarb cake.

And here's the recipe for you:

For the dough:
200 g butter
160 g sugar
2 packets vanilla sugar (about 16 g)
4 eggs
150 g sour cream (around 24% fat content)
360 g flour (I use spelt flour)
2 heaped teaspoons baking powder

For the custard:
750 ml milk
60 g sugar
25 g vanilla sugar (1 part ground vanilla beans, 9 parts white sugar)
60 g starch
250 g sour cream

For the streusel:
400 g flour
200 g sugar
about 16 g vanilla sugar
300 g butter (cool to cold)

and, of course, rhubarb - 2 kg of rhubarb. Yes, that is a lot. This is not a puny little cake that has a hint of rhubarb. This is Rhubarb Central with Streusel on Top.

Peel the rhubarb and cut into cubes of about 1 cm side length; sprinkle lightly with sugar to draw some of the juice (and acid) out. (You could also blanch it, but I go with the sugar version on this one.) Let sit for about half an hour (or longer, that is no problem).

Put most of the milk for the custard into a pot, mix in the vanilla sugar, and bring to a boil. Use the remaining milk to stir in the starch and the sugar. Once the milk is boiling, take it off the heat, stir in the custard mix, place back on the heat and stir until it thickens and bubbles lightly. Remove from heat and let it cool off a bit, stirring occasionally.

Beat butter and sugar for the dough to a creamy mixture, add eggs, vanilla sugar, sour cream and the flour mixed with the baking powder. Spread on a baking tray (a large one, 30 x 40 cm), and pre-bake in the pre-heated oven for about 12 minutes at 180°C with the convection fan on. I recommend using a baking frame around the tray, as the cake will get rather high in the end, when it is all assembled.

Cut the butter for the streusel into small pieces and knead together with the rest of the ingredients until just combined; it should form smallish streusel all on its own.

Stir the sour cream into the custard and spread on the pre-baked dough layer. Dough visibility after you do this: zero.
Now spread the drained rhubarb cubes on the custard layer. There will be a lot of rhubarb. That is meant to be this way (and also why the cubes are so small - they pack more densely this way). Custard visibility after adding rhubarb: close to zero or zero.
As the final layer, you spread your streusel on top of the rhubarb. Rhubarb visibility after adding this final layer should be close to zero or zero.

Bake at 180°C for about 30-35 minutes; the streusel should be golden brown.

There you go. The custard and sour cream mix wonderfully with the tartness and taste of the rhubarb; the dough basis makes it a cake, and the streusel add texture and sweetness and buttery richness. It's not very sweet overall, so if you prefer your cakes very sweet, you might want to add more sugar to both the dough and the custard - I love it best this way.

If you're making it (it's the season, after all), do let me know if you agree or if you have another opinion on what is the world's best rhubarb cake!

There's finally, finally an end in sight. I'm not the world's fastest knitter, and things are made worse by the fact that I tend to knit in spurts and then let the knitting mellow in some corner for a while when things get hectic, or other stuff takes priority, or I plainly don't feel like knitting at the moment.

There's just a few more rounds to go on the five-toe socks, though, and then it will be time to bind off.



The next project is already lined up, the swatch is knit, well, actually there's four possible projects competing, and two swatches completed, but I'm quite sure which of them will win the race for now.

Did I mention I need to knit faster?

During one of the last evenings, when we chatted about this and that (between just staring into space and enjoying the quiet), one of the topics that came up reminded me of another EscapePod story that I enoyed a lot, called "Even the Queen".

I'm tempted to tell you more about the story now, but if your brain works similarly to mine, it might would ruin the funny surprise that I had a little ways in, when I realised that it was about something else than I had surmised. So... have fun listening, if you care to give it a try!