Market Research: Fabric-a-Brac Redux

It seems to be the season for funky craft markets. Over the last couple of months I've managed to stumble across three different market events selling a variety of crafty supplies and handmade items, and they've resulted in quite a few successful shopping trips. 

Seeing Spots

I've always envied people who can sew their own clothes. The idea that you can have clothes that fit you exactly and look just like what you want is ridiculously appealing to me. When I first got my sewing machine, I had a crafty night with my friend G and I watched in awe as she sat down with an old pair of jeans, some patchwork material and a pair of scissors and just whipped up a skirt. I've been looking for a longish black and white skirt for a while and haven't been able to find one (why is everything mini-skirt length these days?), so I decided to try making one.

Ice Cream Sandwich

My lovely friend Jade and I have been talking about moving in together for a while. It's been about a year in the making, but two weekends ago she finally moved in, and its been a blast! It seems, though, that having a new housemate is a good excuse to clean your apartment, and so for the last couple of weeks we've been attacking the kitchen and cleaning out the fridge and pantry. In the process I discovered that we have an overabundance of cocoa - apparently every time I've need to bake with it I've just bought some instead of checking if we have any.

Seeing all the cocoa made me want to bake, and we had some walnuts lying around, so I decided to make brownies. My mum has a really good Cadbury cookbook so I borrowed the recipe and a large baking tray and went to town with it. Unfortunately I seem to have taken too large a baking tray - the amount of brownie mixture that was made barely covered the bottom of the tray. The resulting brownies were dense and delicious but they were pretty flat.

Jade took a look at them and declared they looked like biscuits. She then decided that we should make ice cream sandwiches out of them, and my brain practically exploded.

I love ice cream. It's actually physically impossible for me to describe how much I love ice cream, because when my brain thinks about it it goes like this:

s;ahf;oaihefohkjsdlasdlfjkjlksoie!!!ICE CREAM!!!!sadkljhfo;hsj;adf

We'd discovered during our freezer clean-up that not only did we have ice cream in the freezer, but we had two flavours of ice cream. There was vanilla and chocolate with chocolate chunks (mmm, even more chocolate!). We ended up making two-tone ice cream sandwiches, and they were amazing. They're pretty easy to make, and we had fun mushing the ice cream into vaguely rectangular shapes. Next time we do it we might go to some extra effort and freeze the ice cream in square containers first, then cut actual rectangles out of it.

They tasted delicious, and I think I was still on a sugar high four hours later. You'll have to forgive me for the somewhat dodgy photos - I wanted to take some nice ones but I got too excited about actually eating them that I had inhaled them before I could be bothered to cleaning off the plates and lining up the shots!