Charity shops, beer and cake - life's good things...

Yesterday was a productive day. In between feeds I took the little'un to the baby brasserie at the local Childrens Centre, then walked in to town with him for a quick poke around in a couple of charity shops. I'm a bit limited as to which ones I can get into with the pram, but I came home with two vintage floral patterned linen teatowels (£2), a BabyGap babygro for little'un to grow into (25p), and a huge cream cotton curtain with a lighter beige cotton lining fabric which will be used to make Many Things (£4). They're in the wash at the moment, but once they're dry I'll post some photos - particularly of the teatowels, they're too pretty not to. I'm going to have to have a very careful think about what to use them for that will do as little damage to/waste as little as possible of the fabric as possible.

I had a quick tidy of the sitting and dining rooms, washed out a pressure vessel for husbeast's latest batch of home-brew, which even at the price of around £20 for a kit including everything you need to make a good quality real ale, works out at the price of around 50p per pint.

Since little'un and I are expecting visitors on Friday, I also had time to make two malted spice cakes, using the Wartime Housewife's malted cinnamon cake recipe. I made two because husbeast is capable of demolishing one of these in a frighteningly short space of time. As a slight variation on the recipe I use mixed spice instead of cinnamon, make the cake in an 8" loose-bottomed tin and don't use any icing - one of the things we love about it is that it isn't too sweet.

That said it does go very well with vanilla ice cream as a pudding...