happy cakeday to me

where on the stair?

I am slumped on the sofa with P watching Friday night TV through half-closed eyes when something appears from the hole where the radiator pipe used to be. I have just enough time to shout 'Mouse!' and it disappears. After a short conversation designed to reassure me that a) the mice are not out to get me b) I am not unhygenic c) It isn't my fault, I get the mousetrap and load it with bird seed. The trap sits next to the pipe-hole for a week, untouched. I decide that the mouse was just scoping out the premises, and has found a better place to stay.

We are standing in the kitchen making a cake for my upcoming Birthday Event With a Zero At The End when I catch a movement in my peripheral vision. Something has leapt from somewhere and landed on the small step into the kitchen that everyone trips on. My id takes over and I scream as I watch a very fat looking mouse scuttle along the edge of the kitchen door and round into the cupboard under the stairs. This mouse looks entirely at home. Damn. I move the mousetrap from the radiator pipe hole, re-bait it with peanut butter (one needs a little variety) and put it in the cupboard under the stairs. This morning it remains untouched.

Next door have just got a cat, and I am blaming the Bluebell effect for my influx. Do not disabuse me.

cake du jour* - macaroon

Macaroons hover somewhere in the grey area between 'cake' and 'biscuit'. I have never had a macaroon that did not come from a shop, and can only guess that home made ones would taste of something other than synthetic almond plus rusk with a tang of cardboard. A good one is chewy on the inside, but the point of the macaroon as far as I have always been concerned is the rice paper on the bottom.

I am not entirely sure when the pursuit of cakes-with-paper-you-can-eat became something worth doing, and let's be clear: it isn't something I lay awake at night obsessing about, but there is something sort of special about the little disc which sucks the moisture from your tongue when you bite into a macaroon. I like it, and even though more exotic cakes beckon from behind the curved glass front of the baker's counter, a macaroon will always call to me.

*Yes, I know - it's been a while, hasn't it?

go on, have a slice

Emma and Cake
Originally uploaded by Liz G.

See! I have made a Simnel cake. I made it like my Mother did and then served it on my Grandmother's plates, which makes it in my estimation a multi-generational cake. As my camera is still broken I then forced Liz to photograph it when she came round with Matt for tea. I paid her with cake though, so I reckon I got away with it.

Happy (belated) Easter.

the cake that refused to go away

Cut and Come Again (with resolutely imperial measurements)

1/2 lb self raising flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 round tsp mixed spice
4oz butter or marge
4oz demerera sugar
30z currants
3oz sultanas
1oz mixed peel
2oz glace cherries, washed and chopped
2 eggs + enough milk to make the liquid up to 1/2 pint
grated rind of an orange (add this to the milk and eggs)
7 inch cake tin

Grease and line the tin (always my job aged about 8). Preheat the oven to gas mark 4 (moderate, or 350 F.) Rub the butter or marge into the flour and other dry ingredients until it looks like breadcrumbs. This is very satisfying but if you are in a hurry I think you're probably allowed to use a mixer these days. Stir in the sugar and the fruit, then add the egg and milk mixture with the orange rind and beat until you have a smooth batter (which is full of fruity lumps, obviously). Pour the mixture into the tin and sprinkle a little more sugar over the top (for the crunch). Cook in the centre of the oven for about 1 hr 20 mins (it's worth checking after an hour if you have a fan oven). Once cooked, remove from the tin and stand on a rack to cool. In other words, have a slice while it's still warm, it'll give you indigestion but it's delicious.

Also:
Cake cooking is generally best accompanied by something on Radio 4. I recommend 'Just a Minute'. Plays are also good, but you'll have to find something else to do in the kitchen after the cake so that you can hear the end. If Radio 4 is unavailable, Radio 2 will do at a pinch but it'd better be Jimmy Young.



Happy cooking!

cake du jour - battenburg

Battenburg. I'm sure we called it something. Chess cake or something like that, but I am full of cold and my synapses won't snap. I used to pull it apart before I ate it, I know that. I still would, come to think of it. I like food that I can play with. I'm a fiddler.

We ate it at Grandma's. I remember sitting next to her on the sea-grass stool, eating Battenburg from one of the marbled cake plates on her little round oak table. The living room was a haven of toys from the late fifties, and card games. There were matchbox cars whose rubber tyres you could chew off, and tanks that fired spent matches. My favourite was the wooden tiles that you could arrange into different patterns. Some of them had been chewed by various dogs over the years, which made the corners a slightly funny shape but didn't dent their attraction. Grandma would sometimes run through a variety of names including the dog's before she got to yours. You could sit in her living room at that table for hours, and never be bored.

Nowadays the sea-grass stool is in my living room, the oak table under my window, the cake plates in my dresser. I don't ever eat Battenburg though, and I've forgotten how to play Rummy.

*If you too have been having trouble uploading images to Blogger you need to change your Blogger dashboard password so it points to ww2.blogger instead of blogger.beta. Like magic, it is.

interlude

Originally uploaded by etcher67.

Blogger's image uploading capacity is broken, apparently. In the meantime I can only blog photos direct from flickr. The fact that I cannot currently upload drawings means that of course I am rather desperate to do so. Which sort of implies I've done some: incorrectly, as it happens.

In the meantime, here is Grandma's cake, in all its marginally undercooked glory. I should like to apologise to her for describing it as slightly dry in a previous post. The memory plays odd tricks. 'Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate'* is my new favourite quote, and connects nicely with the fact that today not only have I baked a cake but also hoovered, changed the sheets, rearranged a bookshelf, made a lampshade and cooked a proper dinner. Again. It must be all the drawing that I'm not doing.

*The rest of the quote 'still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait' could be my family motto, really. It's Longfellow, by the way. Do not however be fooled into thinking I know about these things. I just remember words I like and google well.

cake du jour - cut and come again

Blogger won't let me upload a drawing of the cake I was going to write about, so what the hell; I'm going to write about one I don't have a drawing of. Fiendish, or what?

Cut-and-come-again was Grandma's recipe. It sat in the recipe box on a yellowing index card, written in her careful pharmacist's handwriting. I don't actually remember ever having it at Grandma's, but the evidence that it was hers is there in the inky handwriting, stuffed between folded pages from magazines and pieces of grease-spotted scrap paper. Unlike Christmas cake it was a delight to eat direct and uncooked from the mixing bowl: a loose batter lumpy with cut peel and scented with mixed spice. Cooked, it was a light fruit cake from which fat raisin crumbs would drop as you sliced and then sliced again as its name demanded. A very slightly dry, dark-golden cake which perfectly accompanied a cup of tea and the interminable wait for the football results to finish on a dark winter's Saturday afternoon.

cake du jour - Christmas

I remember the frenzy in the kitchen which surrounded the making of the Christmas cake (and pudding). Huge bowls filled with dark lumpy liquids which were difficult to stir, and not that interesting to secretly taste. After the stirring and baking my Dad would be called upon to ice the cake. This creative process involved quite a lot of swearing, and we would stay away from the kitchen while the difficult birth was under way (any similarity to my own creativity and/or kitchen action will be loudly and ineffectively denied). Afterwards we would gather around to admire the result. There were Christmas ornaments which would sometimes be allowed to sit on the hard icing surface: a bristle Christmas tree and a snowman or two. Their bases always had last year's concrete icing still attached to them. I used to lick them. This stikes me as unsanitary now but it didn't occur at the time; I just wanted a little taste of Christmas.

I'm not a huge fan of Christmas cake, it's too rich and too sweet and comes at the end of a day filled with too much excess. The best thing about it at home was the plates it was served upon: the wedding tea service only allowed out of the cupboard once or twice a year. Pretty, pretty plates that I covet still. I do remember the first time I was served a slice of dry-tasting cheese with some un-iced cake, down the road at my teenaged second home: how it tasted different and somehow better along side the sharp contrast of the cheese. I still feel guilty about the betrayal of liking their cake better, though at 15 I liked anything better if it was out of my own home.

Nowadays the cake comes from Marks and Spencer, we are spared the swearing in the kitchen, and fortunately I am no longer quite so belligerent.

Happy Christmas, and may your new year be filled with much merriment. Or cake. Hell: both.

cake du jour - chocolate

My mother made a chocolate cake probably every other week. Chocolate cake made from a victoria sponge recipe with cocoa not drinking chocolate in the mix. The buttercream filling included Nescafe (dissolved in water at the bototm of a tupperware cup and poured into the butter and icing sugar - a plum job to make as the bowl required scraping after), and on high days and holidays there might be something involving melted cooking chocolate on the top. It wasn't very rich, it wasn't even very chocolatey, but there is no chocolate cake in the world better than one made by my mother. I remember shortly after I'd left home carrying half a cake back up to London, and putting it under my bed when I finally arrived at my damp bedsit. In the middle of that night I had to get out of bed to eat a slice, sitting on the floor in the dark, wishing I were still at home. From the age of about 10 I gave up requesting a traditional birthday cake of any description and settled for the chocolate. Even now if I remember I still send a request for chocolate cake ahead of me whenever I go home.

As kids we'd get a regulation thin slice, followed inevitably by another thinner one (spot the puritanical streak), and then it'd go back in the tin. Stacked in the cupboard under its matching blue biscuit tin. Later on I'd sneak into the kitchen and open the cupboard to ease myself inside and gently pull out the tin, levering off the lid then running my finger down the cut side to scoop out the buttercream filling, or even cut the thinnest slice possible off to eat some more. My silence would give me away. 'What are you doing in there?' she'd shout, and I'd stand there behind the cupboard door swallowing guiltily so I that could tell her 'Nothing'. She wasn't fooled. She never was, though I never got into trouble, exactly. I was just out of favour for a while. One of the advantages of age and my prolonged absence is that cake filching is now acceptable behaviour, and I no longer have to hide behind the cupboard door. 'What are you doing in there?' she still asks 'Evening it up a bit?' I reply. You can get away with a whole lot more after the first 30 years, I find.

cake du jour - brownie

Right, let's get something out of the way. Strictly speaking, I do not regard a brownie as cake. However it definitely cannot be regarded as 'biscuit' or 'pie', and so it remains in the 'cake' category until I have a better idea of my criteria.

Brownies did not enter my life until my teens. I have this idea that they were an American import, and I am not altogether convinced that anything American reached Totnes before 1980. (Unless you count Leonard and Dorothy Elmhurst, of course.) I am pretty sure that my first encounter with a brownie occurred when I took over a friend's burgeoning breaktime refreshments business for a brief period at the Totnes School of Language while she and another friend went on holiday. I was handed a recipe and given instructions to turn up with brownies and dispense tea, which I duly did. I am amenable in that way, and I strongly suspect that there was money in it for me. I made the brownies in my Mother's kitchen and seem to remember that they went down a storm. People still mention those brownies to me, I kid you not. Admittedly those people are relatives but let's draw a veil over that.

I also vaguely remember having brownies laced with hash at some point during my college years. It's a scandalous admission but I was an art student so these things are to be expected. I remember sitting on the sofa with my friends and giggling incessantly, and then watching 'The Cotton Club'. I've been meanig to watch it again ever since (a mere 20 years) as I'm sure the giggling got in the way of the storyline.

Whilst working at Printspace I used to go and buy utterly fantastic brownies from Konditor and Cook (oh, what it was to have money) whenever friends were coming to visit the studio. This helped to draw attention away from the fact that the stools were fabulously uncomfotable and the place was cold beyond belief. It may also have diverted the palate from the distinct tang of parrafin in the tea, as those brownies were top notch. When friends weren't coming I would buy the slightly cheaper and distincly inferior ones from Borough Market instead. They weren't as nice but were much bigger which helps make up for a lot.

Nowadays I am partial to a brownie in times of stress and PMT. I go to the supermarket, buy a pack of three for 99p and tell myself that they will last all weekend. Without fail I end up I scoffing the lot in an evening. This aptly demonstates the affect of a glass or two of wine on my willpower, and leads me to conclude that it would be a dangerous thing for me ever to cook them again unless there are friends coming round.

when payment due exceed accounts recieved

I feel like I owe a post. I feel like I owe a post that is not about cake. I feel like I owe a post that is not about cake and that is cheerful. I feel like I owe a post that (which?) is not about cake, is cheerful and is also witty. I feel like I owe a post which is not about cake, is cheerful, witty and intelligent. I feel as though I owe a post a post which is not about cake, is cheerful, witty, intelligent and well written. I feel as though I owe a post which is not about cake, is cheerful, witty, intelligent, well written and will make people add me to their blogrolls. I feel as though I owe a post which is not about cake, is cheerful, witty, intelligent, well written, will make people add me to their blogrolls and then I won't feel such an almighty arse at blogmeets*.

Basically.

Fuck it. Am going to go back to writing about cake.


*this post is not really about blogmeets. Honest.

simple pleasures (4)

Cake had to make an appearance sooner or later, didn't it? Cake is mother-love, hug replacement, over indulgence. In school we self medicate with cake constantly in an attempt to cancel out our bad days. Then the next day we beat ourselves up for eating too much cake.

cake du jour: special feature - banana bread returns

It is perhaps not such a good thing to have discovered that banana bread goes rather nicely with cheese.

I have today (in between interviewing roofers and contemplating the state of the garden) baked myself a loaf of banana bread. It is delicious, if a little flatter than one would expect. Luckily, I have several excellent excuses for the flatness of my banana bread:

Excuse number one: I used the wrong flour. Plumstead refuses to stock wholemeal flour choosing instead to offer a splendid range of Indian garam flour, so I resorted to wholemeal bread flour, which I knew in advance to be a mistake. I meant to put in some more raising agent but forgot.

Excuse number two: I have no scales. I'd forgotten that I gave my scales to my Mum because she admired them so much. I haven't got around to replacing them and didn't remember this until I got home from the land of cheap scales (the pound shop). I therefore had to convert the whole recipe to American measurements (tablespoons and cups) which was inordinately clever of me but definitely resulted in rather random measuring.

Excuse number three: I think the (pound shop) loaf tin was a bit big and I would have been better off with a half-pound one, but there wasn't one.

Excuse number four: This is the first cake I've baked in nigh on 15 years. I obviously need practise.

In the meantime the cake though slightly flat and rather breadier than I suspect it ought to be tastes bloody delicious. There's rather a lot of cake for one person and I was planning to give some to Erialc for her children to eat, but then I remembered that it has nuts in it and nuts are probably verboten*. I'll just have to eat it myself. It's lucky that I have put in a lot of training when it comes to cake eating and am up to the job.


*Erialc if you see this and are prepared to offer the babies nut-infested banana bread let me know. Let me know quite soon because you and I know just how fast I can eat cake :)

cake du jour

Fondant fancies never made an appearance at home, but I do vaguely remember Nanny producing them at tea time. Nanny had an exceptionally sweet tooth and it was hard to go longer than 30 minutes in her house without sugar-related food of one sort or another being offered. She compensated for this by only ever offering small amounts. The mini mars bar was a particular favourite: a sweet which I have always loathed and which was constantly pressed into my sweaty hand between the ages of 7 and 12. I ate it anyhow, as I have inherited Nanny's taste for both regular and sweet food (as well as arthritic pain in my little fingers). The fondant fancy would fulfil all of Nanny's criteria, being both excruciatingly sweet and rather small. Nowadays it seems impossible to eat only one. I much prefer the lemony ones but of course will eat a pink one if nothing else is available: who am I to fight the family genes?

Recently a group of us spent some time in school contemplating producing a giant fondant fancy for Trouble's wedding. It is perhaps fortunate that we never got around to it, as the resultant sugar rush would surely be apocalyptic, and South East London cannot afford to lose that many teachers in one go.

cake du jour

It wasn't until I left home that I found out the bananas had been just for me. Quite by chance one day when I was home for the holidays Mum mentioned that as I no longer lived at there, she no longer bought them. I was probably hunting for one in the fruit bowl at the time, as they are still more or less the only every day fruit that I will eat voluntarily. 'Eat an apple' was always my Mother's reply to any expressed hunger, and I've long held a grudge against apples as a consequence.

Banana bread was the result of my uneaten bananas. When they started to go black in the bowl she'd bake banana bread. The result was a plain but distinctly banana-y loaf cake. Pale, with a darker crust and little dark spots inside. Although dry it wasn't one of the cakes that it was acceptable to put butter on (although circa 1983 it would have been Flora). It was a dull sort of a cake: the sort that you would not be tempted to have more than one slice of, and I haven't seen or eaten it recently, in fact probably not since I left home.

cake du jour

We never actually had Dundee cake as kids. I used to want it, but as the only cakes we ever ate were made by my mum (two a week), and Dundee wasn't in her repertoire, so we never got it. Dundee cake came in a red tin, beause it was bought. We didn't have any money when I was growing up, so we didn't have things that were bought. Especially not foodstuffs. Foodstuffs were cooked, in the kitchen. Now that I am older I realise that this want was entirely about the not having. I have always been prone to wanting things merely because I cannot have them.

At the time though, it was the almonds that made me want it; those whole almonds stuck into the top of the cake in concentric circles. I suppose they seemed exotic. Certainly my mum never stuck things in the top of the cake. Granted, she regularly poured all manner of delicious things over her cakes (things which I would usually get to lick from the bowl), but they weren't almonds, and they weren't stuck in.

I remember the disappointment the first time I tasted Dundee cake. I ought to have known because I don't really like fruit cake, except my mum's. I especially don't like rich and slightly bitter fruit cake, which has no icing or marzipan to distract you from all that fruit. And almonds? They don't make up for the lack of sickly sweetness. In fact, they are sort of hard and tasteless having been through the baking process.

I don't remember the last time I saw a Dundee cake. Were they a product of the 1970s? Or have the citizens of Dundee been making cakes, sticking almonds in the top of them, and stashing them away in red tins for centuries? Suddenly I need to know.

cake du jour

touring the facilities

I sit in the garden wearing headphones and trying not to sing out loud, squeezed into a small and ever-decreasing patch of sun; drawing pictures of cake.

Mainly I am drawing the pictures of cake because I meant to be drawing something else, but the thinking about something else has unlocked the pressing need to record all the cakes I can think of; and unlike the other thing I am not having any trouble with thinking about cake. Cake and I have had a long and happy relationship. Rare are the times that cake lets you down, forgets to call, says something which touches an uncomfortable nerve. And if it does? You eat the bugger and buy another one.

I get to about 15 kinds of cake without really trying to think about it, and then add another five or six with a minimum of effort. Then I decide to do the food shopping. As I am excited by my cake-ish list I think about the drawings as I drive. I come up with a couple more kinds of cake, and then I start to add rules. I will only draw the cakes that my mother made when I was little. I will only draw cakes that I have eaten with friends. I will exclude tray-baked cakes, anything including the word 'bread', tarts of any description. Slowly, I make it harder for myself. Take something which was fun, and turn it into work. Build restrictions and traps into my creativity which are pretty much guaranteed to force boredom or failure.

Luckily; and probably for the first time, I realise what I'm doing to myself and stop. I decide instead to draw every kind of cake I can think of, eaten and uneaten, whether cooked by my Mother or Marks and Spencer, the only rule being that I fancy drawing it. Then I can put them into categories if I so desire. Or not, as the case may be. I also reserve for myself the right to stop drawing pictures of cake whenever I feel like it. It isn't work.

short skirt, long jacket

When I rang my Dad on Saturday to enquire about fixing the dripping bath taps he said 'I don't think you should do any more DIY this weekend'.

So I didn't. Instead, I mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, went to the library, did several loads of washing and drew 27 different kinds of cake. Admittedly this included jam tart, which I am not sure really counts as cake.

I have since thought of a 28th.

I am the countess of cake.