Few things delight me more than the sight of our strawberry patch in summer. The strawberries are wild ones that were growing when Mark moved here and year after year they colonise more space in the front garden and produce bowlfuls of tiny, impossibly sweet little strawberries. They are very fragrant – reminding me always of a stick of Tinkerbell lip gloss I owned as a girl – and very sweet.

Their diminuitive size is more than compensated for by their superior flavour. They also colonise space in a somewhat ravenous way, sending out plucky little vines which immediately seem to become new plants. I established many in the front garden when I lived in Oxford… they just love to grow!

I am always struck by the generosity of the plants, the glut of tiny fruit they generously produce, but always puzzled as to how best to use them. They are very nice as a kind of grazing treat; leave on the side and then nibble throughout the day, and lovely on breakfast also. But they don’t keep very well and their intense strawberry-ness makes them need to be the star of their own show rather than, say, a co-member of the cast in a production of ‘le fruit salade.’

So today I had the inspiration to use them, in the style of blueberries, in a batch of muffins. The recipe is adapted from a weight-watchers recipe for apple and apricot muffins. The batch benefited greatly from a tip my last landlord gave me on muffin-making; apparently the key to good muffins is to only mix the ingredients loosely. The batter ought to be a little bit lumpy and uneven and the ingredients just barely mixed; apparently it is over-beating the mixture that produces dry, airless muffins. I’ve found this an invaluable bit of knowledge.

Muffins:

100g of small, wild strawberries (I don’t think this would work very well with conventional, cultivated strawberries, as they lack the aromatic intensity of their wild cousins… but give it a go!)
low fat cooking spray
juice and zest of a lime
200ml skimmed milk
300g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
salt
80g caster sugar
2 medium eggs
90g margarine/butter

Preheat the oven to gas 6/200*C/fan oven 180*C

Lightly grease 12 hole muffin tin with low fat cooking spray or line with paper cases

Mix lime juice and milk and leave to curdle somewhere – this gives the muffins a lovely, light texture

Stir flour, baking powder, pinch of salt into mixing bowl. Crush margarine/butter into the mixture and kind of mix it up so the lumps of margarine aren’t so big…

Pour the milky mixture and the two eggs into the bowl, also the sugar; stir it until it is a lumpy batter

At the last minute, stir in your strawberries and lime-zest, dollop your mixture into the muffin tin and bake everything in the oven for 20 – 25 minutes

Cool on a wire tray and then mange

Delicious

I enjoyed these muffins as a celebration of the return of my knitting mojo. Observe Maven, my latest and completely simple knitting project:

Created by Courtney Stansbury of Pink lady knits, this lovely clutch-in-progress is based on one of Carrie’s clutches from Sex and the City. Apparently, the one featured in the series was made by Margaret Nicole.

It is, by the way, impossible to pull off that look (the belt and skirt I mean) if you actually *eat* any of the muffins I’m advertising here…

Having followed some of the ‘SATC knitwear you love’ threads in Ravelry, I was keen to make myself something joyous from the wonderful TV series, and this clutch appealed for its amazing simplicity. I faffed about with trying to add cables, knit it in the round and do other clever things, but in the end it was its no-nonsense, stockinette charm with knitting-needle handles that appealed to my crafty instincts and any additional foo on top of that wonderful simplicity ended up being rather like the proverbial gilded lily. I was planning on writing my own pattern until I saw that one already existed… thanks Courtney! I got the yarn at Prick Your Finger and it is an organic cotton, worth every pretty penny I paid for it. Knitting with this is like being stroked by the gods of cotton with the feathers of rare cotton-birds. It is *beautiful* stuff, though its relaxed plying makes for slightly uneven rows of stockinette:

I am almost certain that the freakish whiteness of the bag will make it a magnet for coke and red-wine spillages but perhaps I will be too busy stroking it for that kind of mishap to ever happen. Instead it will get grubby from my little paws endlessly cooing over and mauling its insane softness. How can cotton even *be* like this?

I plan on lining it with this fat quarter which I bought on ebay over a year ago and was awaiting for a real strawberry shortcake moment to use;

It is lovely fabric indeed and seeing it peeping at me from inside the bag will make me very happy and remind me of the lovely plants in the garden.

I am pretty sure that in similar strawberry-homage, I made this strawberry plant felt necklace in 2006, around my birthday. I distinctly remember sewing yellow thread ‘seeds’ onto the strawberries in the car on the way to Alton Towers (I love roller-coasters) and being somewhat obsessed with the structure of strawberry plants… their vines and variations of green.

…and if I can ever bring myself to continue with the lace project of doom that is the Moonlight Sonata, I might be able to improve the experience for myself by using these cheery little stitchmarkers I made at Prick Your Finger on the same day I bought the cotton for the clutch. Is it pathetic that I found a tiny basket for the little strawberry stitch-markers to live in? You wouldn’t believe how many corners of my studio appear to be inhabited by fairies/elves/pixies/things that utilise miniature items…

…and finally, to bring the whole ensemble of strawberry-ness together, I have this fabric button badge that I found on a stall in Cambridge when Mark and I were there a couple of weekends ago.

So yes. It would appear that I have my knitting mojo back, and strawberries are taking over my studio. It’s amazing how far you can run with a simple idea, like ‘I love the strawberry patch in the garden…’