XXX Baking And XOX Knitting

I had a craving for chocolate cake last week. I am not a huge chocolate cake fan – I prefer vanilla or most other kinds actually. Chocolate cake, to me, is ‘flavoured’ with chocolate while a piece of chocolate is the real thing. I prefer the real thing.

As we gear up to move, we are also trying to use up some of the stuff in the cupboards. What to my wandering fingers should appear, but an instant marble cake mix, ready to prepare! Our oven regulates a bit high so I decided to make cupcakes rather than a cake. It’s a cake mix, right? It’s been my experience that instant cake mixes are pretty hard to mess up. Apparently not…

As this was a marble cake mix, I mixed up enough for the vanilla part and poured that into the cupcake papers in the baking tin. I then mixed the rest of the vanilla with the chocolate powder from the mix (truly, I was just following the instructions!) and poured the chocolate batter over the vanilla batter already in the baking tins. I guess the chocolate portion was heavier and caused a bit of a ‘volcano’ effect.

A very obscene volcano effect (I mean, really, what do these look like to you?).


I bet this experiment would be hard to replicate however, just in case, I may be cut off from making ‘marble flavoured’ anything until my child is at least ‘PG 13’!

Onto knitting news. I have said before that I’m a slow knitter and, at 182 stitches a row, this blanket does not seem to grow very often. I’m also a bit of a timid knitter when it comes to trying new things. It took me saying that I was going to work on the cables for the blanket on this blog last week to work up the nerve to try cables again. Remember I was teaching myself? I’m not scared anymore. In fact, the night before last, I noticed a mistake in my cables and, yesterday morning, took four stitches down four rows and fixed them up – all on the third try! I’m very pleased with myself.

Here’s how the Baby’s blanket is looking now.

Can you see the beginning of the OXO cable?


I probably should have started the cable pattern a little later as the bottom ‘X’ is cut off, however, I will know that for the next time I design something with this type of cable. Overall, I think these little guys (there will be nine OXO cables across the middle section of the blanket) will add much more interest to an, otherwise, pretty boring knit. Love those colours though – they will look great with my new stroller. Hmm. Perhaps that will provide another photo op another day?