Happy Tuesday evening, lovelies!
Today is another festive seasonal teatime, so I invite you to grab a cup of something warm and delicious and perhaps a little treat and settle in for awhile...let's get cozy!
This past week has absolutely been gorgeous! It seems at though all the leaves in town decided to turn color at the exact same time. Driving down the streets is quite like driving through an autumnal postcard...trees on either side of the road bursting with leaves of gold and crimson and sometimes even pumpkin orange, though that is the least common color. As soon as I think I like one color best, another color becomes my new favorite, only to happen again several more times before I return home again. Leaves are piling up on the roadsides and the sidewalks are basically a carpet of crunchiness.
For my tea today I'm enjoying a mug full of blueberry tea, one of my absolute favorites. I love the gentle flavor of this tea and the beautiful color inside my mug getting deeper as it steeps makes me smile. Of course, with most herbal teas, the scent is blissful, too! And I'm using a bright and colorful mug in the Pioneer Woman's line. I received this mug in a teacup and mug exchange that I participated in numerous times hosted by a dear blogger. Sadly, she is no longer blogging but that event is such a fun memory of mine. {{smiles}}
Seeing as how this was "apple week" in the teatime series I had already planned on making an apple dessert this weekend, so the timing was perfect. Our tart apples were sitting on the counter just waiting to be included as the star ingredient in a scrumptious seasonal dessert.
This apple skillet cake recipe was found in a cookbook that I dearly love for several reasons. Honey and Jam by Hannah Queen is a gorgeous cookbook that can easily be read from cover to cover. It is divided up into four seasons with all the recipes featuring ingredients that are in season at that specific time of year. I love sitting down with this book at the start of each season and choosing one or two special desserts to bake during the upcoming months to truly celebrate that season. I first made this apple skillet cake our first autumn here at Shady Cottage, three years ago. It was such a fun cake to make because it is baked in one of our cast iron skillets...these things are so versatile and useful, we just love them!
The cake is soft and filled with apples. I always use tart apples and I really think it makes the flavor really stand out. The crumble topping is perhaps my favorite part as I am a lover of anything with a crumble on top. Though I must say, I think that the next time I make this recipe instead of using cold butter like the recipe calls for in the crumble, I'm going to use melted butter. I think that will give more of the texture that I prefer in a crumbly topping. Also, I left out the rosemary in the topping...I just wasn't in the mood for that flavor. Next time I’ll also add some spices, too!
This week's theme is thankful hearts and home blessing. While I could write about gentle homemaking rhythms that we incorporate in our home or how we are preparing our home for Thanksgiving or share the things I'm most grateful for, I thought I would combine the two themes into one. And how I wish to share that is through a few specially selected excerpts on the blessing of home from a couple of my favorite novels. These passages that I've chosen are, in my opinion, absolutely beautiful descriptions of home and of the blessing that home is. These words warmed my heart and I found a kindred spirit within their message, and I hope you do, too.
The two books I'll be sharing from in this blog post are:
Pilgrim's Inn (I shared about this novel here.)
The Tale of Hill Top Farm (I shared about this novel here.)
And both of them I heartily recommend!
In Pilgrim's Inn, this is how the author described the home in the story...
It looked immensely strong, as strong as a fortress, glowing and safe, friendly and warm and most deeply alive...The beauty of this place had laid a spell upon them. It seemed too good to be true...It seemed gathering them in, holding them close...It was like a strong stone fortress and it welcomed you with a mighty laugh.
It was wonderful driving home with the last glow of the sunset lingering in the west and the hedges black and mysterious on either side. There were lights in the cottage windows, and sometimes they had forgotten to draw the curtains and one saw the flicker of firelight, the bright heads of children sitting round a table munching their 'cooked tea', a man reading a paper with a pipe in his mouth, or a woman with head bent over her darning. This, too, was new to Caroline, used to the years of blackout. It was lovely and most magical, like turning the pages of a storybook, each fresh window a fresh story.
~ both excerpts taken from Pilgrim's Inn ~
Here are some of my family's favorite apple recipes...
Instead of the lap of the water against the river wall, they heard the whisper of the flames, and instead of the flowers in the garden they smelled the roasting chestnuts, burning apple logs, coffee, the oil lamps, polish, all the house smells. This intimacy with the house was deepening; when winter came it would be deeper still.
There were some fine bits of Bristol ware upon the mantlepiece, flowered chintz curtains at the windows, strips of plain matting upon the floor, and pots of geraniums upon the window sills. The table was laid for tea with a blue-and-white-check tablecloth, willow-pattern china, a homemade cake, scones, and honey. The room was gracious, lived in, warm, glowing, and altogether glorious...And extraordinarily familiar...Standing there in the sunlight and firelight George and the children felt as though they had come home. They looked at each other, but they could not speak.
~ both excerpts from Pilgrim's Inn ~
What Beatrix loved more than anything else were tiny cottages with crooked roofs, their stone-flagged floors brightened by rag rugs, the ceilings hung with braids of onions and fragrant herbs, the rooms furnished with old-fashioned oak sideboards and grandfather clocks and chairs with woven rush seats. Farm houses with no pretensions to grandeur, with mullioned windows and thick walls and narrow passages turning and twisting every which way...Homes that made her want to reach for her pencil and draw.
Perhaps it was her artist's heart that coveted the warm glow of firelight reflected from copper-bottomed pans, or her artist's soul that longed for shafts of dusty sunlight falling through windows bright with blooming flowers. She sketched these whenever she could, and in a way, these sketches of cozy rooms and sunlit windows and comfortable furniture, peopled with cats and mice and little dogs, substituted for a home of her own and a family that didn't sulk and glower at her. But Beatrix knew that she could never be entirely happy until she lived in her own house, a real house, exactly the right house.
~ both excerpts taken from The Tale of Hill Top Farm ~
Some of my previously written posts on gentle homemaking...
She could make Hill Top into her own domain, a house of her own, with everything in it just as she wanted it. The house would be the house of her dreams, the house where she belonged, where she could imagine herself leading the kind of life that would make her, at last, content. And all around her would lie her own land, fold and fallow, garden and green meadows and pretty patches of woods. And on it she would have own animals: cows and pigs and chickens and sheep, yes, Herdwick sheep, those sheep who instinctively knew their own heaf.
~ taken from The Tale of Hill Top Farm ~
I don't know about you, but those passages remind me of the beauty, importance, and most of all, the blessing of home. I am reminded of just how thankful I am for home and family and for the life lived within our four walls. I'm grateful even for the tasks done in order to make a house a home and for the creativity and art that homemaking really, truly is. How warm, comforting, cozy, snuggly and settled in our home feels...I hope you have that, too.
May your week be a blissful one, dear friends!
Savour the beauty of November and cherish the world of home...today, tomorrow and forever!
♥