Beet brownies and waffle scarves

Those beet brownies I mentioned last time... not a fan. They would be great for people who wish their desserts tasted more like vegetables. I was hoping that the chocolate would hide the earthy beet flavor, but to me it comes through pretty clearly. On the plus side, I can eat these with lunch and pretend it's my vegetable serving. (This is the recipe I used, if anyone is interested after that review. To be fair, I think the recipe is fine and it's probably pretty nice with the cream cheese frosting, which I didn't make.)

I also got squash blossoms for the first time in this week's CSA box and totally bungled them by deciding that they would be a great thing to use in my first-ever serious attempt at deep frying. Fortunately, squash blossoms stuffed with goat cheese and basil still taste great, even if they've been mangled.

In happier news, I made progress on my African flower hexagons:

Now I need to decide how to turn them into actual pillows. Ideally I would just continue making hexagons for both sides of the pillow, but I don't have enough of the same yarn for that (the perils of stash-busting). I could use the two pillow-halves to make one pillow case with mismatched sides, but I don't really see the point of that. Or I could try to eke out enough yarn to make a back side out of plain double crochet (or stockinette?) for each of them. Or I could try to find some way to attach the crochet to fabric, although that seems overly fussy and less sturdy than using crochet for the whole thing.

Or I could just give in and buy more yarn.

All of that is an overly long way of saying that this project is now hibernating, and since I need a new project simple enough to work on while watching tv, I started a waffle scarf:

It's a free pattern from Lion Brand and one that intrigued me in my early days of crocheting, but I never got around to making it back then. Now, it's a quick and fairly mindless, but still satisfying way of, yes, using up more stash. Caron Simply Soft makes me crazy with its tendency to split, but it does feel pretty nice in a scarf. This might be another one for my charity pile (it's a pile if there are two things in it, right?).