Elmtree

@elmtreem

Writer, storyteller, lover of the weird. Books, documentaries, stories, archaeology, history, coffee, mysticism and myth. I make a mean focaccia

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Elmtree@elmtreem· 20d

Annnnd it’s done. Man my feet hurt now 😂😂 But music-themed triple layer chocolate chip red velvet cake with vanilla buttercream & chocolate ganache buttercream ‘rustic’ finish is now complete. Plus hand made 🎶🎵 Considering I’m like a hobby baker at best am pleased with that! Hope he likes it!

Completed cake on a silver cake board, chocolate and cream buttercream is swirled in a sort of mixed patter with chocolate sprinkles and music notes on the top and sides of cake

Elmtree@elmtreem· 21d

We have completed music notes, cakes done, buttercream done…now to put it together soon 😬 This cake though…made chocolate ganache buttercream and cream buttercream and got chocolate to put on too it’s gonna be calorie dense!

Black fondant music notes on parchment paper hair drying a bit to decorate a cake

Elmtree@elmtreem· 21d

Thank you.. you can tell I was panicking - ‘tootles’ should be ‘tomorrow’ and instances - ‘in stages’. Don’t think I’ve ever used the word tootles in a sentence in my life 😂. Ok cakes baking and some of the notes done and painted…

Music notes made out of black fondant with black edible paint on, drying on a baking sheet

Elmtree@elmtreem· 21d

Me a week or so ago when asked to do a cake for a 19th birthday for someone..sure yea of course, deffo plan that out and do it instances should be fine Me this evening (it’s getting picked up tootles) staring at all this and knowing it needs transforming.. Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫🤯🤯😭😭

Stuff for a cake - eggs butter lemon and milk for buttermilk, Greek yoghurt and calories enter things (will eventually be a red velvet and chocolate chip cake with music notes on it for a music theme)

Elmtree@elmtreem· 25d

Experimenting with focaccia today so this one will be thin and with sun-dried tomatoes and some basil as well as black olives and garlic..little departure so employing ‘ask forgiveness not permission’ tactics on notoriously habitual Saturday eater son…. 😁😁 #baking 🍽️

Bread dough for focaccia in a metal bowl ready for proofing, the Sind tied tomato’s have given it a warmer hue and you can see sole black olives and red parts of the tomato in tje dough

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 12

Magic eye clouds…swear I saw an owl in this. Do you see it?

A sunset over a Welsh mountain with a patch of dark cloud and some pink sunset colours in it, in tje centre tje clouds form what looks like an owl

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 10

Heart in the sky ❤️

Clouds catching sunset light in a blue sky, dark rain colours and light clouds catching pink light, one pink cloud is in the shape of a heart

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 10

Golden times up the mountain #sunset #wales

A Welsh mountain with light long grass and a dandelion clock catching the golden light of the consent with a gentle gold pink sunset wash

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 8

Beautiful light this evening. 🤍🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Belt of Venus during golden hour across the gorse, long grass and mountains, Rhondda, Wales

Sun dipping behind the mountain in tje opposite direction. Lots of gorse and a little golden hour light glomg across the valley in tje middle and the mountain in tje other side of tje valley

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 6

Quiet thresholds 🥰

A shadowed path of trees and foliage meets a bright blue sky and light green grass

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 6

Leaves & light

Sunlight streaming through the gaps between trees, lighting up some leaves

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jul 6

Painted Lady #butterfly today - I think. My enquiries suggest this one because it’s faded and a little raggedy has flown a long way to Wales

A brown and orange butterfly with white spots resting on a overgrown grass verge

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 27

Figured since I was whacking focaccia in & doing some pizza dough I’d do a cheeky baby boule today #sourdough - yea the heat/humidity omg, paused bulk after less than five hours, put it in the fridge immediately & 2.5 hours later it has kind of exploded 😳👀 No idea how that’ll bake tomorrow 🍽️

Shaped sourdough loaf ready for cold ferment, it has figs in it which you can see and is a good couple of inches dough wise below the edge of the banneton rim

Same sourdough fig loaf after 2.5 hours in the fridge it’s smooth and domed and about an inch above the rim of the banneton

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 27

Ok focaccia done 🥰. This is the usual - rosemary , garlic and black olive 🍽️

Baked focaccia on a chopping board, it is crispy on top and golden brown With good bubbling and some rosemary and picked showing

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 27

So #weekend reading is The Count of Monte Cristo, got a book group at work & a colleague is reading for the first time so said I’d join her as I’ve not read it (watched the 2002 film!) loving it but can we agree Villefort is a snivelling sycophantic butt monkey?? Hate that guy 😂 #booksky 💙📚

Front cover to The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 25

Alright storm gods do your fucking thing. Please ⚡️⚡️⚡️⛈️⛈️⛈️⛈️ About an 70-80% chance apparently tonight where I am. I fucking hope we get one. Preferably massive with a lot of rain, the humid heat crap has gone on long enough. Pretty sure Sofia agrees, got a double coat poor thing 😬

Grey cat on a purple mat looking warm and super grumpy

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 24

Feel so extremely lucky! I knew there were #bats in my roof over the last few years but they seem to have moved to above my bedroom and last night at midnight I witnessed the most extraordinary thing - at least 100 of them all swirling dancing spiralling and chattering right outside was all 😮 WTF

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 22

Well, son responded to this weekend by very unusually for him deciding he wanted to go out for a hike. Set a blistering pace up to the top of Pen Pych in #wales . Exhausted but think we both needed it. Top of the mountain at the edge looking out over the valley 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿❤️

Top of Pen Pych in Wales showing some purple foxgloves and behind it the Rhondda valley with mountains on either side

The waterfall Gwion Bach at Pen Pych. Water cascades down mossy rocks and into the basin below

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 21

Just a little tribute to one of the best cats I’ve had the pleasure to spend many years with. This is Zach, he was 12 and died very suddenly yesterday. Luckily he seemed to have very little pain and we were close by so I was able to hold him and tell him it was okay as he died. He was awesome ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Zach, a black cat, coming up to me for scritches

Zach laying on tje sofa looking up at me

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 15

Ah firstborn now home, pretty sure I saw an osprey on the way there, had a great car catch up and he even did all his washing before packing it up. Kid’s alright. 🥰 Pic from the sea by his digs this last year

Blue sky and fluffy white clouds with a pebble sand beach and blue grey sea, tide mostly calm and out

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 13

Ooo got a couple of reads lined up for this weekend - never did finish The Master & Margarita so wanna finish as it is amazing! And the second is brand new to me but different to my usual fare so let’s see….( plus Ursula because ofc!) Good read book blurbs in alt ☺️ #BookSky 💙📚

Front cover to The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Hugh Aplin translation)

GoodReads blurb:

As a mysterious gentleman and self-proclaimed magician arrives in Moscow, followed by a most bizarre retinue of servants - which includes a strangely dressed ex-choirmaster, a fanged hitman and a mischievous tomcat with the gift of the gab - the Russian literary world is shaken to its foundations. It soon becomes lear that he is the Devil, and that he has come to wreak havoc aomong the cultural elite of the disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master - the author of an unpublished historical novel about Pontius Pilate - who has turned his back on real life and his lover Margarita, finding shelter in a lunatic asylum after traumatic publishers' rejections, vilification in the press and political persecution.

Will the Devil manage to enlist the fiery Margarita into his ranks, will she remain faithful to the Master to the very end and come to his resue? At the same time a satirical romp and a daring analysis of the nature of good and evil, innocence and guilt, The Master and Margarita is the crowning achievement of one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century.

Front cover to the audiobook of ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’ by Kate Summerscale: (reviews in GoodReads are mixed but the complaints seem to be about what I’m looking at it for - a deep dive investigation and exploration of Victorian Society and values )

“The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.

At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate is Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.

Front cover to ‘Words are my Matter’ by Ursula K Le Guin - blurb from GoodReads:

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality. . . ."

Words Are My Matter collects talks, essays, introductions to beloved books, and book reviews by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our fore- most public literary intellectuals. Words Are My Matter is essential reading. It is a manual for investigating the depth and breadth of con- temporary fiction — and, through the lens of deep considerations of contemporary writing, a way of exploring the world we are all living in.

"We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 13

Happy the weekend! Am gearing up for son to come home from uni for the summer soon - can’t wait, although life is about to have a hell of a lot more anime in it, he’s a massive anime fan & we’ve got a few lined up! My favourite of our back catalogue though…(still waiting for Infinity castle!) 🔥🔥🔥

An image of Rengoku from Demon Slayer with his famous line ‘set your heart ablaze’ (still makes me cry every time, was NOT prepared for that scene!)

Elmtree@elmtreem· Jun 9

Picked up some absolutely gorgeous Peonies yesterday, they smell divine. Never really paid much attention to them as a flower before, and can’t think why, they are glorious! My absolute hands down new favourite flower, can’t stop burying my face in them 😍 #Flowers

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 25

The fairy pool at the base of Pen Pych, fed by the upper #waterfall Was cold but amazing, I feel so lucky. ❤️❤️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿. #Wales

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 25

The incredible #waterfall at Pen Pych with a #rainbow at the base. Is actually a double 🌈🌈 behind the big rock to the left. 😍😍

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 25

Oh my. Hiked up to the #waterfall at Pen Pych today and it was calm enough to get right into the basin (carefully!) and then visited the fairy pool at the base of the mountain and got in for a swim. There was a robin and a butterfly landed on my hand as I left. Magical 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿❤️❤️ Vids of both below…

At the base of Pen Pych waterfall, this waterfall’s one name js Berw Wion. A rainbow os at the foot of the waterfall and mossy rocks have the waterfall splashing off them

Sitting in tje fairy pool at Pen Pych, mossy green rocks and clear water with gentle little cascades to the right filling the pool

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 23

Green green moss on rock with water dripping from it, close to the falls. The birds were so gorgeous

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 23

Beautiful wander to Sgwd Rhyd yr Hesg / Melincourt falls today. Was gorgeous, so so green. You can get very close at the bottom so got a #waterfall spray shower first and then clambered towards the back and right into the mouth of the rock, which was incredible. ❤️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Walk to Sgwd Rhyd yr Hesg / Melincourt falls, the river is running over rocks and is framed by intensely green trees and mossy rocks and ferns

Melincourt waterfall, with a pool at the bottom amd lots of boulders and rocks and Green trees growing all a round it

Behind the waterfall, wet rocks and water cascading and behind that blue sky

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 23

Yum staring my BH weekend with a little #baking - roast veggie, goats and feta cheese wraps and a paprika tumeric and eventually apricot #sourdough all getting there / done. Gonna finish the dough ( possibly pause BF in the fridge for a bit!) then off to enjoy the sunshine!! ☀️

A load of baked off pastry wraps on paper towel in a chopping board cooking from the oven with the veggies filling showing ( roast aubergine, red onion and mushroom tossed in a little olive oil, paprika and cayenne)

Sourdough starting to form in a bowl after a couple of stretch and folds, golden in colour due to the turmeric and paprika

Elmtree@elmtreem· May 17

Ok bad news is didn’t have a blade for my lame or apparently any knife that isn’t blunt so opted for kitchen scissors to make expansion cuts 😬 (it was also a bit under, was trying to replace a lot in the tank and left way too much!!) #sourdough Good news is I can now poach eggs apparently!! 🍽️