Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

As regular readers will guess, the church biscuit has not been high on my list of priorities in recent weeks, although they have made more of an appearance than apparent from the blog. Here are a couple of biscuits I did manage to make for coffee in church before the election.

I surprised myself by starting these chocolate shortbread biscuits one Saturday afternoon with plenty of time to spare. I was then able to give them the full hour in the fridge as the recipe required. Well, in fact, I got rather lazy and left them in overnight, rashly thinking I’d get up that bit earlier on the Sunday and bake them just before church.

Double chocolate shortcake (from BBC’s Good Food, Easy Baking Recipes)

This was not a very good idea. I got up in good time (several gold stars for this) but then discovered that my refrigerated chocolate logs were too hard to get a knife into. (I now know that 10 secs – or v. slightly more – in the microwave on half power would have softened them sufficiently to go under the knife. But I didn’t know this then.) Moderate panic ensued as there wasn’t even a packet of custard creams or non chocolate digestives around, so I grabbed reliable Mary Berry and made walnut shortbreads instead. They turned out to be very good and the walnuts gave them a great flavour. (What about topped with chocolate or made with pecans instead…? Plenty of possible variations here.)

Fortunately on the following Tuesday we were putting on a tea for half a church of theology students from nearby Cuddesdon College, so my chocolate shortcakes were not wasted (shown below with possibly the best chocolate cake previously blogged about here).

Walnut shortcake (from Marry Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book)

Walnut Shortbreads

 100 g wholemeal flour flour (finely ground better)

75 g plain flour

75 g light muscovado sugar

100 g butter

50 g walnuts, roughly chopped

icing sugar for sprinkling

Recipe from Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cake Book (BBC Books, 1994)

Pre-heat oven to 160 degrees C/150 degrees for a fan oven/ 325 degrees F/ Gas Mark 3.

Lightly grease and line a square baking tin 8″/20 cm square.

Measure the flour and sugar into a large bowl and rub in the butter with fingertips. Mix in the walnuts. Knead gently to bring together to form a dough. (Alternatively process the ingredients in a food processor.)

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface until about the size of the tin. Put this in the tin, pressing it gently to fit. (Lots of pushing went on here.)

Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 15-20 minutes or until pale golden. It will still be soft when removed from the oven and you can easily score lines in it which will make cutting easier. Holding the baking paper, lift the shortbread out of the tin and allow to cool. When cool, break into pieces along the scored lines. Dredge with icing sugar.

Make 16

Milk chocolate cake and Double chocolate shortbread biscuits

Double Chocolate Shortbreads

175g butter, softened

85g golden caster sugar

200g 7 oz plain flour

2tbsp cocoa powder

100g chocolate chips

Heat oven to 180 degrees C/160 degrees fan/Gas Mark 4.

Line 2-3 baking sheets with baking paper.

Mix butter and sugar together with a wooden spoon. Stir in the flour and cocoa, followed by the chocolate chips – you’ll probably need to mix it together with your hands at this stage.

Halve the dough and roll each piece into a log about 5cm thick. Wrap these in cling film and chill for an hour. (You can also freeze the dough at this stage and in a freezer, it will keep for up to a month.)

Slice the logs into 1 cm thick rounds and place these on baking sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.

I measured ingredients out in grams for my recipes and as I can vouch for those, that is what I am giving. I have omitted the imperial equivalent in both recipes as I noticed the 4 ounce equivalent is very inaccurate. Looking up conversion charts, I see the following:

1 oz = 25 g

2oz = 50 g

3oz = 75 g

4oz = 125 g

5 oz = 150 g

6 oz = 175 g

7 oz = 200 g

8 oz = 225 g

Just notice the big jump from 3-4 oz of 50 g

Surely we could be a bit more accurate than that?

I hope this doesn’t inconvenience anyone working on those lovely old fashioned scales, although you can get metric weights for those too.

JM monogram in suzani style (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Suzani is the name of the very distinctive embroidery produced in Uzbekistan, mainly the cities of Tashkent, Nurata, Samarkand, Bukhara and Shahrisabz, each place producing work with a local twist which helps those who know about these things to distinguish the place of origin of any given embroidery. The western fashion for vintage Sunzanis has made such an impact on demand that it has led to a revival of a craft which had almost disappeared under the communist government of  the mid C20th.

JM monogram in suzani style: detail (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Fortunately after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 there remained a well of knowledge of the craft among older people and now these are passing their skills of both design and practice on to younger people – often members of the same family.  Look here for an uplifting article describing the new industry in more detail – it is also where I saw the motif on which I based my own embroidery for the monogram shown here.

JM monogram in suzani style: Stage 1 showing pure wool felt padding for letters

Floral motifs abound in Uzbek suzanis and favourites include palmettes (the one I have used), rosettes (most common) and pomegranates. You can also often see some borrowing of Ottoman motifs, like the tulip, as a direct result of historical cultural interaction and trade along the silk route.

JM monogram in suzani style : Stage 2 where felt letter is slip stitched to fabric

I love the stylised flowers of the suzani but I make no attempt to reproduce them exactly, preferring to interpret the motifs in in appliqué as well as embroidery – but satin stitch rather than chain stitch or basma stitch (also known as Bukhara couching). It is interesting that the women who make suzanis (and those who made them in the past) never sought to produce identical work. The background fabric is hand woven on narrow looms (ideal for work in the home) and several women work on individual strips which are then sewn together to make one large bedcover or hanging. This leads to a certain irregularities in stitching, colour and tension such that the motifs don’t match up and align perfectly.

JM monogram in suzani style: Stage 3, embroidery progressing

Some westerners appreciate such inconsistencies as part of the unique delight of hand made things but others, deeply immersed in the regularity of machine made textiles, complain and regard the work as shoddy and substandard. It surprises me how uplifting it is to read about this in the Hand and Eye article mentioned before as I often battle against expecting my own work to approach some ideal perfection which I don’t really want but somehow still seem to expect. I always like the idea of incorporating (or rather not eradicating) errors on the grounds that only God is perfect, although, by the by, it’s very difficult to find any authority for this idea which is often swatted away as unworthy of consideration as if it’s an irritating fly the world could well do without. (I bet QI have torn the idea apart and, klaxons blaring on all sides, have consigned it to the bin of urban myths we should immediately abandon. Apologies to those who do not know this British television programme.)

JM monogram in suzani style: Stage 4 showing embroidered letters

Discussion of perfection put aside, this monogram is a celebration of colour. Perhaps the letters would have stood out more in black but I just loved the lime green which reminds me of light through young beech leaves. I fought a worm of an idea to unpick them and do them again and decided to glory in their not being perfect. Battle won.

JM monogram in suzani style (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I have included some photographs showing the stages of making padded letters as Penny has asked me to in recent comments. I will try to go into more detail in future posts but hope in the meantime, theses images are helpful. (And a propos my non pursuit of perfection you can clearly see that the end down stroke of the ‘M’ is a bit curvy – something I didn’t even notice until I added these photos!)

For my own version of a suzani cushion look here where you can see it alongside the real thing (bought from Liberty).

18 May Update: It’s no good, I’m unhappy with the ‘M’ and realise I’m going to have to re-do it. Too spindly and pathetic, it distracts from what I like about this monogram. I shall not do it today as I’m having a bit of a tidy up anyway I feel I need to take it slowly. Hope to post a new photograph later in the week.