Coconut Muffins, Tomatoes, and Knitting!

Finally, I have something knitting-related to share!  But first, the delicious muffins.  I (as usual) used Deb's recipe over at Smitten Kitchen.  I only had desiccated unsweetened coconut, so for the topping I re-hydrated 1/4 cup coconut flakes with a tablespoon or so of basil simple syrup (made a few days prior for rum-basil-lime beverages).  There's also about a tablespoon of the syrup in the body of the muffins as well.  I made three of them with some white chocolate chunks I had laying around--these are the dessert muffins.  Yum.  You can't really taste the basil, but you definitely get the tangy-ness of the yogurt.

In other news, my tomato plant is looking prolific!  I can't wait for them to ripen.



Now for the knitting.  A coworker is moving away soon to a very cold location, and I wanted to send her off with something fun: Marley's Ghost, from Winter '05 Knitty.  This was my first felting/fulling project, and I'm pretty excited with how it turned out though I did have some concerns at first.  Before I even got started on the pattern, I had resigned myself to knitting twenty (or however many) boring links, but it turned out that I really enjoyed it!  Somehow having to manipulate the already-knitted links around the DPNs while knitting the new link kept my interest while still allowing for mindless knitting.


So this beautiful knitted mess will become lovely links in the wash.

18 minutes of a hot water agitation bath leads to this:

I took these pictures before I trimmed all the fuzzies off because the light was just too good to miss.


More pictures on the project page on Ravelry here.