Hot cross buns and Easter egg trails

Happy Easter! I hope you are enjoying a long weekend and a bit of a rest today.

This week started off quite well. I had an unexpectedly free day (when I thought I would be finishing my research proposal, which I had somehow sent in a day early), so I decided to bake. I was in a baking mood after making Debs Dust Bunny's crumb cake muffins a few weeks before - I was halfway through an essay and wanted a break and a snack. I made these in 45 minutes!

So this week, I baked some fancy-pants Earl Grey and orange hot cross buns to take to my friend's in the evening. They looked nice and they smelt amazing while they were baking...but they tasted a bit meh. Maybe I needed to steep the tea for longer and use more orange zest. Also, I am really rubbish at any kind of proper bread dough - I don't have the patience to knead thoroughly for five minutes, let alone ten.

As it happens, my friend had also planned to have hot cross buns, and had bought some from the supermarket and from Konditor and Cook. I was bunned out by the time I left! I picked a primrose from his garden when I left - it had such a delicate scent.

My friend gave me some lemon chiffon cake in lieu of an egg, which was much appreciated later in the week. Coincidentally, I noticed a Twitter friend had just been to a Konditor and Cook piping class. Becs (who I met at the Depressed Cake Shop in Bromley) came away from her class with a Curly Wurly cake and two trays of brownies!

For years, I have wanted to take my autistic sister on an Easter egg hunt. She has never been on one, and there is not much that she is enthusiastic about, but chocolate is one thing. She was in a good mood on Good Friday, so we went to the Red House in Bexleyheath, which was doing the National Trust egg trail. The house is gorgeous - it was created by and for William Morris, in collaboration with his architect friend, Philip Webb. Fortunately, the grounds aren't too big - I think my sister would have been impatient otherwise! We went around with our piece of paper and I asked her to stamp the paper every time we came across a stamper along the way. She got a bit fed up of doing it towards the end, so I finished it for her. After a tea break in the cafe, we went back to the start of the trail and I asked her to give in her completed trail. The lovely ladies there (I don't know if they were staff or volunteers, but they were so friendly and a real credit to Red House) went to get her prize and one of them said, "Have we got a blue one?" because my sister was wearing a blue jacket. My sister doesn't often look pleasantly shocked, but she was upon receiving her egg! She obviously thought that the trail was just me trying to get her to do something educational/nature-based.

The next day, we went to Hall Place to do their trail. Theirs was much more spread out - I saw a few little kids crying because they'd gone around once and hadn't found all of the letters (which spelled out a phrase)! My sister also got fed up halfway through, and so I had to run around in the drizzle and finish it off for her so she could get her prize.

I took a few moments to appreciate the spring beauty in the gardens - lots of pretty heather, magnolia, and the start of apple blossom.

 There were also strong-scented hyacinths and narcissi, and cowslips in the open and nestled amongst the hyacinths.

And here are some Easter leftovers: too short stems of forsythia, scented 'Double Smiles' narcissi and 'Atlantic' muscari, all from the garden or greenhouse.

I love how the forsythia and narcissi are the same vibrant yellow! Perfect partners for Easter.

British Summer Time

I accidentally set my alarm for 6.20 this morning, instead of 7.20 - I forgot it was so clever it would add the extra hour by itself! It was good to get an early start on my uni work, but it's a shame the weather is so gloomy and rainy outside.

But it is now British Summer Time. Which means longer, brighter evenings, and eventually more of this: buckets of colourful, scented flowers from the garden!

Music festival vs musical

My 'Miss Saigon' hyacinths look gorgeous now. They are a stunning, sexy purple and the scent is wonderful - it's not as sickly-sweet as some hyacinths. They are short and fat though, which means they are not much use for floristry (although maybe if I grew them differently they would be?), but they look beautiful grouped together in a pot.

I compared them to another purple I grew a few years ago. This is 'Woodstock', which grew long and lanky, and didn't last very long. I think I need my hyacinths to be somewhere in the middle!

Floral cupcakes and toxic daffodils

I did some flowers for the Garden Museum's cart, which is part of the museum's stand at the Edible Garden Show at Alexandra Palace this weekend (you can still buy tickets for tomorrow!). I bought some edible (if they are grown organically) flowers from Alagar at New Covent Garden Market, to mix with the herbs and bulbs that are in the museum's cutting garden.

I learnt yesterday, during Jonathon Moseley's weekly #flowertalk hour, that tulips petals are edible. Unfortunately, the tulips in the cutting garden are not ready yet, but there are loads of daffodils. Daffodils are definitely not edible - apparently, some people have been getting them mixed up with spring onions as they are often sold in the same section in supermarkets. Don't mix them up! But as the flowers are so seasonal and there is an abundance right now, it didn't seem right to leave them out of the display.

I wanted to make some rosemary bowls to use as bases for a couple of arrangements. I reused two plastic plant bowls and reused floral foam (cutting out the horrible bits and turning it upside down), cutting the foam into a rounded shape and taping it in place. Then I covered the two bowls with rosemary. There is loads of it in the cutting garden, and it's certainly edible - the staff in the Garden Cafe use the herbs in their cooking. I stuck double-sided tape around each plant bowl, and then placed a large rubber band around the centre. I cut the rosemary into similar-sized lengths that just came higher than the bowl, and added them close together around the bowl, using the rubber band to keep them in place. Once the bowls were covered in rosemary, I tied raffia (again reused) around the centres to cover the elastic bands.

I left one looking quite green and natural, with lots of edible sage and lavender from the cutting garden, and a few inedible daffodils. For the other, I wanted to make a giant cupcake, so I used layers of pink and yellow carnations (which would be edible and scented if grown organically!) and more sage.

I had been saving carefully broken eggshells (using a knife along the very top, rather than tapping the egg on its side) with the intention of making a "bird's nest" planted arrangement as Isabelle Palmer does in her wonderful book The Balcony Gardener. But I didn't trust myself to a) plant up the eggshells without breaking them or b) plant plants that would actually survive the week! So lovely gardener Liz at the Garden Museum took them off my hands and returned them filled with wild strawberry plants.

Liz wasn't due to work on Thursday morning, when I was getting the flowers ready in the museum's knot garden, but she happened to walk past and see me, and decided to join me and help. She found me some violas (more edible flowers) and some mixed planted gifts that she had made up earlier. She also cleared out the flower cart so I could fill it with the new flower display. She also found me a flowering herb called cardamine that I had never heard of before, but whose delicate pink flowers grace the garden in front of the museum.

I crumpled some chicken wire into two metal buckets and threaded lilac, quince blossom, the stems of the poor beheaded carnations, and a few leftover carnations into the gaps.

And I made a few posies with daffodils (definitely toxic), snowflakes (also toxic, I suspect), and edible lavender, rosemary, sage, and cardamine (the leaves are edible, I think).

You can buy edible flowers from here and here - which is the safest bet if you aren't sure whether something is edible or how it was grown! Later in the year, there are lots of edible flowers, from roses to borage to lavender flowers. Another reason to look forward to the summer.

I feel a song coming on

I've seen Madame Butterfly, but not the musical based on it, Miss Saigon. I was hoping these hyacinths would be ready for Mother's Day for the many women who love the musical!

And Pink Elephant reminds me of a Madonna song that came out when I was at school, with the line "Pink elephants and lemonade". The flowers that have opened smell amazing.

Gyspy Queen just looked like a nice salmon-orange colour when I was browsing Peter Nyssen's webshop...hopefully it will be when it flowers.

And my muscari, aka grape hyacinths, are showing promise too.