Chocolate pudding

9 inch cake tin (can be with lowish sides like a sandwich tin)
Or 6 ramekins

200g butter
165g plain (cooking) chocolate
150g sugar (90g brown 60g white)
90g plain flour
3 eggs

Melt together the chocolate and butter.
Stir in all the other ingredients
Put in to tin and bake at 190°C for 15-20 mins until a skewer somes out clean.
Or you can cook for less long and leave the center liquid - that works best in the ramekins.
In a ramekin when you are going for a liquid center it looks like this when cooked, with a dent in the middle, if you cook it more this bit will rise, still tasty, but not quite as good!

Happy Pancake Day!

We haven't been able to do pancake day for YEARS as I have been at work on a Tuesday and therefore in a different country to Doug. 

So this year we had to go mad and attempt to make up for it by eating ALL the pancakes.

Every single one with loads of lemon and sugar as that is the best topping (filling?) 

Ooohhhh full tummy - must lie down!

Bedroom progress

I haven't mentioned it much in all the skiing, cooking and excitement of the new apartment, but work has been progressing - it just takes a really long time to do everything even from the point it looks pretty much done.

We have done:

• The skirting board (still to be painted)
• Made the stairs
• Fixed up round the windows
• Finished the woodwork around the built in wardrobe

We still have to:

• Install the lights
• Install the ceiling fan (bit fiddly as the beam is a bit narrower than the mount and clearly it needs to be very firmly attached...)
• Do the built in wardrobe innards
• Get, paint and install the sliding doors for the wardrobe (one company has disappeared since we chose them, fortunately not paid anything so now trying to sort it out with another company, but there website is shonky - they have just suggested it would be easiest if I send them a cheque!!)
• Paint the skirting board and window sills and wardrobe surrounds
• Clean up and paint the door - possibly also removing a little bit off the bottom of it

Doing the rooms in the extension has been a very good learning experience for how we will do things differently in the main house.

We won't have the hempcrete sprayed will be the main difference.
Instead we will do it behind shuttering. This will give a flatter, firmer, more even insulation layer on which to plaster. We will also do something differently with the finishing layer, perhaps not lime plaster, I am sure you will here more about this later.
It is a little bit of a shame as the lime plaster without paint does look very nice, but I am sure other finishes will to.

The end pieces for wardrobe sliding doors

We need a solid and vertical end for the wardrobe doors to go up against. As the walls are quite wobbly this was a bit difficult to achieve. But Doug achieved it by using a piece of wood supported by lime concrete to give it strength and then another piece of facing to hide all that.

This is the facing which is cut wobbly like the wall and will be painted white

This is the straight bit that the doors will butt on to, looks nice and neat but was hard to get this way.

Probably not entirely clear from the pictures, but when you see the sliding doors in there it will be...

Rendering round the windows

The plasterer left a bit of a mess round the windows in the bedroom. It was difficult for us to prepare for him properly, as we didn't really know what to expect and therefore what we needed to have done beforehand. Round the windows we had insulated a bit and that didn't work very well with his rendering and plastering.

This is before fixing up

After

This is round the door on to the balcony
In progress (I cleaned up the mess that was there, then made a base with ordinary filler and then put in the lime render on top)

 After

We have had to patch various bits of the plaster where plugs have gone in, where the wall hasn't been straight enough to meet the ceiling etc. It is difficult to get a colour match between batches as it is just sand and lime mixed with water. You can see some little white dots in here where the lime is getting old and going in to lumps.

Building the stairs

The extension with the bedroom (and our current living/kitchen/bath/toilet room) is at a different height to the main house so we needs steps down in to it. It was hard to design and make them at this point as we are not sure to within a few centimeters the height of the floor in the main house. Doug came up with a design which hopefully that won't matter as they don't go up to the very top and there can be a little difference in final floor height and it be fine.

In progress - it was a lot of work to get to here as there are some mortise and tenon joints between the two types of wood which were quite a fiddle for Doug to do.

This is him working on those joints

All ready but not finished or stuck together

You can see it will be much easier and safer getting in and out of the bedroom!

Nearly there... just a bit more paint needed...

Skirting board

The walls are quite wavey due to the way the hempcrete insulation was done, then on top of that the plasterer kind of flared the walls out towards the bottom. These things made fitting skirting board rather tricky. Doug had to use wedges as he screwed it to the wall to hold the top way from the wall so it was in line with the bottom (that was touching the wall at the bottom of the flare. We used reasonably thing MDF so it was flexible enough to follow the shape of the wall.

We then filled in behind the skirting board to hide the gap at the top.
Then mastic was applied to hide the join between this and the wall.

We are leaving the walls as unpainted lime plaster which is an attractive pale sand colour. However that has created quite a lot of extra work as we have had to be very careful not to get glue, filler or anything on the walls as it wouldn't be hidden later with paint.

The final thing to do is to paint it all.