Wednesday Meet an Author Brunch with Scotch Shortbread and Bev Irwin

The traditional Scotch Shortbread was made with oat flour, which was much more available in Scotland, along with wonderful rich butter and a relatively small amount of sugar. My most successful shortbread has been made with Plugra, a super rich sweet butter (2 cups), oat flour (3 cups), and Turbinado sugar (one cup.) MIx together, press in a pan, bake at 300 degrees for about half an hour.

Since at the moment sugar and flour are on my no-no list, I can only imagine them with fondness, while we prepare for our brunch with Bev Irwin, YA author from Black Opal Books.  Bev is going to talk about what motivates her.

Hello, everyone. I hope you are all comfortable with a nice cup of coffee, or a hot pot of tea for all the tea totlers out there. We have Tim Horton’s here in Canada and I love their French Vanilla Capachino. So I’ll just grab a cup of that and sit back and tell you what inspires me to write.

The muse started visiting me when I was a young child. I liked to write poetry about flowers and nature. I had a poem published about daffodils when I was in grade three. I still love flowers and nature.

And that is why I love my property. I live on a lovely ravine lot in London, Ontario. I have a piece of the country right in the city.

My home is a hundred-year-old farm house, very plain, no character, but it is surrounded by trees. It was added to as the original owners enlarged their family. It even has a well in the basement, and four drains that run somewhere into the property. Not great with all the rain we had last year. My basement flooded four times. Luckily its too low to put a ceiling in so it’s never been finished. Only my craft materials, wool and some old furniture got damaged.

Imagine coming home and finding water up to the bottom step and the kitty litter boxes floating. Too bad my rubber boots were floating along with them. That water was COLD. No wonder my poor cat was meowing. He got stuck down there and he hasn’t graduated his swimming lessons yet.

To say the least, me and the cat are really (not!) looking forward to spring this year. At least we haven’t had a lot of snow this winter so we shouldn’t be having the big thaw we had last year. We’re praying the basement flooding will keep to a minimum.

But despite the basement flooding, I love this place. In the winter, when all the trees are bare, I can look out my bedroom window and see the pond at the bottom of the ravine.

I love water. Being a Scorpio, I come by my affinity for it naturally. So if I want inspiration, I sit on my deck and look at all the trees, flowers and flowering bushes in my backyard. I have a bar table where I sit with my papers, books, and laptop scattered around me. If I need more inspiration, I take my dog for a walk in the woods and along the water.

Where do you find your inspiration?