The Quiet Magic of an English October | Cook, Sew, Bake | Slow Cosy Days at Home

Join me at home in my old English terraced house for some slow and cosy October days of cooking, sewing, baking, and pottering around the house enjoying all that autumn has to offer. I’ve been cooking and baking simple comfort food this week, lots of stews and homemade bread. Join me as I finish sewing curtains for our kitchen, plan what to plant in the garden this autumn, tell you the origin story of trick or treating, and share my recipe for a traditional English Halloween sweet treat – I’ve been baking soul cakes!

If you’re new to my channel, hi! My name is Stéphanie and this is my slow living vlog. It’s a silly turn of phrase, but it just means that I make slow and peaceful videos about simple things and ordinary everyday pleasures like cooking and baking seasonally and from scratch, gardening, growing food and flowers, and the craft projects I work on throughout the year. Slow living isn’t just an aesthetic fad, although the cottagecore and fairycore spaces can be fun ways to explore a slower pace of life. At it’s heart, slow living is just about carving out time to slow down and find peace and stillness amidst the routines and responsibilities of normal everyday life.

If you enjoyed this video of mine, take a look through my archives and particularly my slow living vlog playlist to see what else takes your fancy. I share weekly videos throughout the year, and you can follow along each week or dip in and out as the mood takes you. Each episode is stand alone. Thanks for being here and taking the time to watch and read my words!

Soul Cakes recipe for Samhain or Halloween
250g self raising flour
125g margarine
50g sugar
1tbsp (15g) golden syrup
50g currants
40g soya milk
1tsp lemon juice
1tsp mixed spice (or pumpkin spice)
1tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp nutmeg

Combine the ingredients, roll out dough to 1/4″ (6mm) or thereabouts, cut rounds, mark crosses, and bake for 15 – 20 minutes at 180C (350F).

00:00 October in England
00:16 making dinner
02:08 cosy evening routine
04:02 making bread
06:50 autumn leaves city lights
09:40 slow living morning routine
13:14 tea and sewing
14:12 hand sewing
15:18 little birds in the bird bath
16:18 finished curtains reveal
18:33 autumn garden plans
20:12 a Halloween story
23:27 baking soul cakes
26:37 sparrows and blue tits
28:25 afternoon tea!

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#slowliving #simpleliving #slowlife

Hello and welcome, come and join me for some slow and cosy October days at home in England. I’m so happy to see that lots of you found your way here to my calm and quiet corner of YouTube with last week’s video. Thanks for joining me! Since many of you are new to my channel let me just take a moment to say hello! My name is Stéphanie, I’m 39 and I live in the suburbs of a big English city with my husband and cat. I love fibre art and textiles, sewing and gardening, cooking, baking, and making things from scratch. In my videos I share quiet stories from everyday life including recipes and adventures in my kitchen and garden, and the craft projects I work on as the seasons move around. I’m a homebody and a maker, and I take a DIY approach to most things. I love sharing these slow daily life videos and connecting with other quiet and creative people who have similar hobbies and interests to me! I call my videos ‘slow living’ but I’m not really someone who goes in for trends or buzzwords, it’s just a phrase I use to connect with likeminded folk! This evening I’m making a simple bean stew for dinner. My dad came to stay with us at the weekend and he brought up some cookware that had been gathering dust in his kitchen. One of the pots is a wide but shallow casserole dish and tonight I’m giving it a christening! These are cannellini beans, cooked from dry. To go with the stew I’ve made baguettes, these are 40% rye, so they’re not traditional baguettes. I’m shaping them to look like wheat stalks. I made a video about these a few years ago if you’re curious. They’re called ‘pain d’épi’ in French. They look fancy, but they’re very easy to make. This is the last evening that I’m going to be looking out at the dark night through these bare glass doors. It’s not very cosy is it! Yellow cherry tomatoes from our garden. I’ve nearly finished making the curtains for those doors, I just have a bit of hand sewing to do to finish binding the top edge of each curtain. Smoked paprika and sea salt. I love cooking with cast iron, but you do have to be patient and use a low heat. ‘Poco meno mosso’ in music terms. With less haste! I’ve just started this book by Andrew Miller. I enjoyed one of his other novels, although perhaps ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word for such a dark book. It was ‘Station on the Path to Somewhere Better’, which I read on holiday in August. Hopefully I’ll enjoy this one too. Let’s see how the bread looks. These are lovely to make to go with a meal as you don’t need a bread knife, you can just tear them. My basic formula for making a balanced meal is to focus on protein, include lots of veg, and make sure that there’s something green. For ‘something green’ tonight, I’ve made kale pesto with homegrown kale, garlic, nutritional yeast, sea salt, lemon juice, olive oil, and some cashews. It’s a simple meal. Sometimes I’m adventurous and try new ideas for recipes and meals, but quite often Ed and I keep things simple with some variation of stew and bread or rice. For those of you who are new, I’m in the middle of decorating at the moment. The black and grey walls and trim will eventually be white. Good morning! Join me for a quiet rainy day of sewing and baking. I want to finish the curtains today, it shouldn’t take too long. After that I want to plant some spring bulbs in our back garden as I bought a big pack of daffodils the other day. I also want to try a new recipe with you. It’s a traditional English Halloween recipe and is part of the origin story for trick or treating! I wonder if we’ll get children knocking on our door at Halloween. We never did when we lived in the flat, as the intercom system was a bit of a barrier. Decisions decisions! I think it’s a masala chai kind of day. Sometimes I use a teapot, but brewing in a tea strainer is my loose leaf lazy method! It’s slightly more refined than mashing a teabag with a teaspoon to make builders’ tea, but only just! If you’re new, I’m a tea addict. I chain drink it all day. I very much embody that particular British stereotype! It’s funny really, my family wasn’t a tea family, but I started drinking tea around the time Ed and I met when we were 15. His family is a tea family. When we were in our early twenties Ed switched his preference from tea to coffee, and now it’s just me who drinks tea! I like coffee too, but it makes my mind race, and a single cup after midday stops me sleeping, so I don’t drink it very often. Hello! There’s a good boy. Trouble will come of it. How long until he starts playing with my thread! It gives me immense joy to see birds use this bird bath, I keep it clean and top it up when the weather is dry. My sewing took longer than I thought it would, it always does. Tiny hand stitches take forever, but the extra time and effort is always worthwhile. I know it’s silly, nobody will ever see this part but the little details are important to me, and I’m so pleased with how these curtains have turned out. Who knows, maybe spiders appreciate fine hand stitching. They can admire my stitches whilst spinning their webs up in the dusty corners behind the curtains! That’s better! One more window down, and a few more to go. The messy corner by our back door, I don’t usually have reason to show you, but it exists! Let me show you the spring bulbs I bought at the supermarket to plant in our back garden. Daffodils, alliums, and fritillaries. I’ve already planted snowdrops that my dad’s cousin divided and shared from her plants back in the spring. The trouble is that it’s started to drizzle, and it’s not very nice weather to be outside today. I think I will hold off with planting the bulbs and bring you along with me in next week’s video as I’ve a few other tasks to do out here in the coming days. Okay, it’s storytime. Before there was Halloween, there was Allhallowtide, a 3 day festival in the Christian calendar of festivals. It’s all about paying respect to the dead, and celebrating our ancestors. In every country with a large Christian population there are variations on the customs and practices of Allhallowtide. It’s still observed in many countries. However, Christian Allhallowtide isn’t the true origin of the modernday festival we know called Halloween. Before Christianity made its way to our shores, our Gaelic ancestors would celebrate something called ‘Samhain’, pronounced sow-en. Like Halloween and Allhallowtide, Samhain marks the end of harvest season, and the start of the dark days of winter. Samhain was a time for taking stock and making bonfires and it was celebrated with costumeplay and folk plays which of course sounds very much like Halloween! Going right back to the Middle Ages we humans have always enjoyed telling ghost stories to one another at the end of the fertile season and the start of the barren days of winter. Stories about how thin the veil becomes between the living and the dead. Stories about spirits, and of souls. In Medieval England children didn’t dress up as ghosts and ask for sweets. Rather, they’d go ‘souling’ from house to house, offering prayers and songs for the dead, and being offered ‘soul cakes’ in return. This tradition had largely died out by the 1950s but soul cakes are one of those very British sweet treats that I have a soft spot for. They’re a cross between (English) biscuits and scones, stuffed with currants, and lightly spiced. Not too different, in fact, to Welsh cakes, or hot cross buns. The symbolism is Christian, with crosses for souls, but they can be enjoyed by the faithful and faithless alike! I don’t really do much for Halloween, although I do love a good ghost story and an atmospheric walk in the woods in the gloaming. I think I’ll introduce soul cakes to my baking repertoire because I love seasonal bakes, and food with a story behind it! I doubt the local children would be impressed if I offered them up for treats on Halloween though! I love how the little birds wait their turn, the blue tits nest in our camellia tree, and the house sparrows love our traditional privet hedges. Gustave has definitely noticed the shift in the seasons, and has taken to his winter sleeping spots already! I’ll leave my recipe for these English soul cakes in the description if you’d like to try making some too. They’re perfect with a cup of tea. Thanks for joining me today, see you in my next video!