We got given a whole load of gooseberries, so as an experiment I tried half apples/half gooseberries in my spiced apple cake.

I’ve got a bit of a cold so things don’t taste of much, but Cecilia informs me that it tastes delicious. I think it would work with 100% gooseberries but you might want to add a bit more sugar depending on the ripeness of the gooseberries.

I’ve updated the recipe with some variations on the apple cake – rhubarb, carrots etc. Has anyone else tried any variations? I’ve tried banana but that was very disappointing – very solid and bread like, it tasted ok when toasted and spread with butter.

The builders have knocked through from upstairs in the house into the upstairs of the barn. This revealed some interesting stone work – see the corner stones at the edge of the hole. This is the corner of our bedroom which is the part that sticks out on the west side of the house,. The fact that this corner was in the wall implies that it was older than the rest of the wall.  Our house is thought to be a long house – barn / house all joined together in one line. So if the sticky out bit is older that the straight bit then is it still a long house? However we know it how a lot of work done in 1914ish (from some newspaper fragments) where we think they redid the front of the house, and there was some evidence that the barn had been one story earlier in its life. Perhaps the sticky out bit was the first part to get a second story?

Hole from the house, showing corner stones from the bedroom

I’ve also been doing a bit of joinery work, building the partition for the bathroom wall, and making a duct for the flues to go up.