However, in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that while I was only having a milkshake, the people in the next booth had cake.
Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Sunday, January 15, 2017
02/52 2017
This week's favourite photo is Jamie being inquisitive in a cafe. Gone are the days when he would peacefully snuggle up in the sling and just look round. That's still fine while we're moving, but if we stop somewhere he wants to see everything and grab as much of it as we'll let him.
However, in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that while I was only having a milkshake, the people in the next booth had cake.
However, in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that while I was only having a milkshake, the people in the next booth had cake.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Cake (picture-heavy)
For reasons too complicated to explain, I found myself committed to baking a cake for a friend in another country who isn't going to be here to eat it any time soon. The only relevant part of the backstory is that I was meant to make a cake some months ago and made a bloody great mess on the floor instead. It's almost like I got DLA for a reason.
Nevertheless.
Part One was done in advance. I found a recipe, of the sort that tells the cook to get an adult to help them with the oven, and went and bought the stuff I'd need.
I think eggs and butter were the only things I had in the house anyway, and I didn't have enough of either, so I purchased the whole recipe. Using mostly supermarket-own-brand ingredients this came to about £15. Admittedly I have a lot of stuff left over - flour, sugar, icing sugar, vanilla essence - but I'm really unlikely to use any of it. Even if we just add up the things that were entirely used up it comes to over £8. It would definitely have been cheaper, in monetary terms, to just buy a cake.
Nevertheless, again. This is not about eating cake. This is about making a cake.
Greasing the cake tin wasn’t too traumatic. Measuring ingredients was a bit okay if a little messy at points. Creaming the butter and sugar brought me back to that whole "DLA for a reason" thing. But that's okay, because the difference between making a cake and cooking a meal is that I can take as long as I like to make a cake, and it doesn't matter if it's the only thing I do today (I will now stop banging on about DLA. I'm just always worried, when I post about my biannual adventures in cookery, that someone's going to try and use it to report me).
Adding the eggs to the butter and sugar was… well it started okay and then I thought it looked a bit lumpy, but no matter how much I stirred the lumps wouldn’t go away, so I figured, it’s butter, it’ll have to melt when it cooks if nothing else, and pressed on, adding a tidge of vanilla essence, a tidge of milk, and the sifted cocoa and self-raising flour.
The resulting dough was tasty… uh, did I say tasty? I meant it looked tasty. Yes. Looked. Having no great cake-making expertise I did wonder whether it was meant to be dough. If it was meant to be batter then I’d done something really badly wrong at the measuring stage. But I was too messy to Google it, or to take pictures and ask Twitter. So I kept going.
Wrangling the wodge of dough from the mixing bowl was awkward, and then it kind of sat in a big sticky messy lump in the middle of the cake tin. It didn't really look like any kind of proto-cake so I sort of splatted it out a bit. Not squished it flat or anything, but made it a bit more circular and more evenly shaped. I probably should have taken a picture before it went into the oven, but it was already in the oven when I realised that, and even I know you're not allowed to keep opening it.
The time it took to bake was longer than the time I needed to find instructional videos on how to check a cake is done and how to get it out of the tin. I have a springform cake tin with a removable base, so getting the cake onto the cooling rack was remarkably easy. A couple of people have already expressed jealousy about my cake tin. Seriously, it cost less than the cake ingredients. If you enjoy baking, and are frustrated by normal tins, then just get one.
And lo! Cake! Properly baked, not dry, not burnt, not soggy!
There was, however, one small problem.
At just an inch and a half in height, the stage of the recipe that called for cutting the entire cake in half horizontally was going to be more of a challenge than this novice could handle. Happily, I'd been looking for a way to avoid that particular challenge anyway, so it didn't take me too long to decide that actually, I'd just cut the cake in half the easy way, and stack the halves into a semicircular cake.
I mixed up the filling and while that was chilling in the fridge, I had my lunch:
It was very tasty.
Finally, it was time to assemble the cake.
From this side it pretty much looks like chocolate mousse with cake somewhere in the middle...
... but from the other side it looks much more cakelike.
If I was doing it again, I would probably try and get a smaller cake tin. I also think that while the whole raspberries look good on the top, for inside the cake, making it a sandwich of chocolate filling on one side and raspberry jam on the other would work better than thick chocolate filling with whole raspberries added.
I have a great sense of accomplishment for having successfully made a cake. All things considered, though, I probably won't be doing it again. The cost of ingredients, the pain, the time, the cleanup, are just all too much for what's basically a pretty mediocre cake. In future I will continue to outsource all of my cake requirements to the lovely experts at Sweet As.
Nevertheless.
Part One was done in advance. I found a recipe, of the sort that tells the cook to get an adult to help them with the oven, and went and bought the stuff I'd need.
I think eggs and butter were the only things I had in the house anyway, and I didn't have enough of either, so I purchased the whole recipe. Using mostly supermarket-own-brand ingredients this came to about £15. Admittedly I have a lot of stuff left over - flour, sugar, icing sugar, vanilla essence - but I'm really unlikely to use any of it. Even if we just add up the things that were entirely used up it comes to over £8. It would definitely have been cheaper, in monetary terms, to just buy a cake.
Nevertheless, again. This is not about eating cake. This is about making a cake.
Greasing the cake tin wasn’t too traumatic. Measuring ingredients was a bit okay if a little messy at points. Creaming the butter and sugar brought me back to that whole "DLA for a reason" thing. But that's okay, because the difference between making a cake and cooking a meal is that I can take as long as I like to make a cake, and it doesn't matter if it's the only thing I do today (I will now stop banging on about DLA. I'm just always worried, when I post about my biannual adventures in cookery, that someone's going to try and use it to report me).
Adding the eggs to the butter and sugar was… well it started okay and then I thought it looked a bit lumpy, but no matter how much I stirred the lumps wouldn’t go away, so I figured, it’s butter, it’ll have to melt when it cooks if nothing else, and pressed on, adding a tidge of vanilla essence, a tidge of milk, and the sifted cocoa and self-raising flour.
The resulting dough was tasty… uh, did I say tasty? I meant it looked tasty. Yes. Looked. Having no great cake-making expertise I did wonder whether it was meant to be dough. If it was meant to be batter then I’d done something really badly wrong at the measuring stage. But I was too messy to Google it, or to take pictures and ask Twitter. So I kept going.
Wrangling the wodge of dough from the mixing bowl was awkward, and then it kind of sat in a big sticky messy lump in the middle of the cake tin. It didn't really look like any kind of proto-cake so I sort of splatted it out a bit. Not squished it flat or anything, but made it a bit more circular and more evenly shaped. I probably should have taken a picture before it went into the oven, but it was already in the oven when I realised that, and even I know you're not allowed to keep opening it.
The time it took to bake was longer than the time I needed to find instructional videos on how to check a cake is done and how to get it out of the tin. I have a springform cake tin with a removable base, so getting the cake onto the cooling rack was remarkably easy. A couple of people have already expressed jealousy about my cake tin. Seriously, it cost less than the cake ingredients. If you enjoy baking, and are frustrated by normal tins, then just get one.
And lo! Cake! Properly baked, not dry, not burnt, not soggy!
There was, however, one small problem.
At just an inch and a half in height, the stage of the recipe that called for cutting the entire cake in half horizontally was going to be more of a challenge than this novice could handle. Happily, I'd been looking for a way to avoid that particular challenge anyway, so it didn't take me too long to decide that actually, I'd just cut the cake in half the easy way, and stack the halves into a semicircular cake.
I mixed up the filling and while that was chilling in the fridge, I had my lunch:
It was very tasty.
Finally, it was time to assemble the cake.
From this side it pretty much looks like chocolate mousse with cake somewhere in the middle...
... but from the other side it looks much more cakelike.
If I was doing it again, I would probably try and get a smaller cake tin. I also think that while the whole raspberries look good on the top, for inside the cake, making it a sandwich of chocolate filling on one side and raspberry jam on the other would work better than thick chocolate filling with whole raspberries added.
I have a great sense of accomplishment for having successfully made a cake. All things considered, though, I probably won't be doing it again. The cost of ingredients, the pain, the time, the cleanup, are just all too much for what's basically a pretty mediocre cake. In future I will continue to outsource all of my cake requirements to the lovely experts at Sweet As.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Wedding: the Aftermath
There are certain patterns with ME/CFS, and one of the major ones has to do with the relationship between activity and fatigue. I follow the classic pattern:
The wedding was obviously an enormous active event. I had planned out a 72-hour food and medication schedule to give myself the best chance and this went amazingly well, but the fact remains that by Sunday morning, despite a full night's sleep, I had a major spoon deficit and the knowledge that it was about to get a lot worse.
First Breakfast was a slice of wedding cake (we'd asked for a couple of slices to be put in our room just in case we didn't get to eat much cake during the reception) and that gave me the kick start I needed to go and have a more traditional Second Breakfast of tea and toast with a few of the guests who had stayed at the hotel. The hotel staff helped us divvy up the leftover cake.
We'd hired an MPV to enable us to move lots of stuff around, but even so, Steve ended up having to go home on his own with the car full of gifts and our own equipment (like the TV and the Wii), empty it all out, and then come back to collect me, my chair, the dress, the suitcase and all the other bits and bobs remaining. By this point I was starting to struggle, but I was able to walk from the car to the house.
My husband (!) and I sat down to open our cards and gifts. We were completely overwhelmed - there were cards on every flat surface and still there were some we didn't have room for, all with the most lovely messages. We just about had the sense to log all the gifts against our guestlist so that we would have an easier time writing the thank-you notes.
That's about all I can really remember as at that point the extreme exhaustion kicked in. I know I did things, like visiting a friend who couldn't make it and eating obscene quantities of cake, but only on an academic level, I don't have any personal recollection of it. Apparently right up to Thursday I was telling people what a marvellous day I'd had "yesterday" at the wedding, and although I wrote a few posts online, they were all absolute surprises to me when I re-read them a few days later! Thankfully Steve had the full week off work, so we could really do everything at our own pace.
One month on and things that are done include:
We still need to take decent close-up photos of "stuff" like the dress, the flowers, the jewellery and so on... Steve's been promising to do this for a while so I think I'll just wait for the next dry sunny day and take some snaps of them in the garden with my point-and-shoot - everything looks good on a sunny, grassy background, right? We need to get digital copies of wedding photos from a few more guests, and then we can start putting together an album.
I also need to do another blogpost or two about some of our vendors who really were exceptionally good.
- I do something active.
- I feel tired, often rather more tired than the activity warrants.
- I have a rest.
- I feel, not 100% better, but significantly improved.
- I carry on with my life.
- ... and then somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after the activity, a massive dose of absolute exhaustion coshes me over the head, all plans must be cancelled and I spend a lot of time in bed trying to recover.
The wedding was obviously an enormous active event. I had planned out a 72-hour food and medication schedule to give myself the best chance and this went amazingly well, but the fact remains that by Sunday morning, despite a full night's sleep, I had a major spoon deficit and the knowledge that it was about to get a lot worse.
First Breakfast was a slice of wedding cake (we'd asked for a couple of slices to be put in our room just in case we didn't get to eat much cake during the reception) and that gave me the kick start I needed to go and have a more traditional Second Breakfast of tea and toast with a few of the guests who had stayed at the hotel. The hotel staff helped us divvy up the leftover cake.
We'd hired an MPV to enable us to move lots of stuff around, but even so, Steve ended up having to go home on his own with the car full of gifts and our own equipment (like the TV and the Wii), empty it all out, and then come back to collect me, my chair, the dress, the suitcase and all the other bits and bobs remaining. By this point I was starting to struggle, but I was able to walk from the car to the house.
My husband (!) and I sat down to open our cards and gifts. We were completely overwhelmed - there were cards on every flat surface and still there were some we didn't have room for, all with the most lovely messages. We just about had the sense to log all the gifts against our guestlist so that we would have an easier time writing the thank-you notes.
That's about all I can really remember as at that point the extreme exhaustion kicked in. I know I did things, like visiting a friend who couldn't make it and eating obscene quantities of cake, but only on an academic level, I don't have any personal recollection of it. Apparently right up to Thursday I was telling people what a marvellous day I'd had "yesterday" at the wedding, and although I wrote a few posts online, they were all absolute surprises to me when I re-read them a few days later! Thankfully Steve had the full week off work, so we could really do everything at our own pace.
One month on and things that are done include:
- We've recovered back to "normal for us" levels of physical and mental energy, house-tidiness, eating and sleeping patterns, etc.
- We've installed our new Stuff in the appropriate places (mostly the kitchen), and taken the old Stuff and all the packaging to the recycling centre.
- I've mostly finished changing my name, although I still keep getting surprised by the odd little things that keep popping up with my old name and I still hesitate every time I introduce myself.
- We've paid off all of the bills, and given back everything that was hired or borrowed like the car and the cake stand, so there's a nice line drawn under it all - we don't owe anyone anything.
- We've had some of the photos back and have been able to print ourselves some copies to show people.
- We've given or posted all of the thank you notes.
We still need to take decent close-up photos of "stuff" like the dress, the flowers, the jewellery and so on... Steve's been promising to do this for a while so I think I'll just wait for the next dry sunny day and take some snaps of them in the garden with my point-and-shoot - everything looks good on a sunny, grassy background, right? We need to get digital copies of wedding photos from a few more guests, and then we can start putting together an album.
I also need to do another blogpost or two about some of our vendors who really were exceptionally good.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Not Blown Up After All
... just a bit tired out.
The New Year fireworks were a resounding success, with the only casualty being one of L's gloves which got singed by a lighter. Then Steve and I enjoyed one day to rest, one day back at work, and one day to get the house passably tidy in readiness for my mum to come and stay for a few days.
We got lots of nice Christmas presents from my family, including a shiny and very spiffy set of saucepans. Nice as they are, sadly, these have not been the accessibility revolution Mr Rhodes seems to think. Firstly, as you will see from their lovely little "42" diagram on that page, the recommended angles only work if you have kitchen surfaces at well below waist height. Secondly, if you watch the video, you'll see that to drain from the saucepan, you need to hold on to the knob on top of the lid as you tilt - fine when it's empty, but in a real world situation that means your fingers are right in the path of the concentrated column of steam as you drain the boiling water away. And thirdly, you actually need more strength in your arms to manipulate it than with a standard pan, because there's no way to get a two-handed grip in order to use the handle as a lever to create stability.
So don't buy them to try and make cooking easier. But, that said, they are very nice saucepans, with a lifetime guarantee. Using the variable draining-holes in the rim of the lid to release varying amounts of steam is handy. And they are fully backward-compatible with a regular colander in the normal way. ;-)
Christmas dealt with, it was just about time for my birthday, which was the main reason for mum visiting. I took down my lovely tree and packed it neatly away for next year.
Between all of them, and Christmas and my birthday, my family have bought me just about every book that was on my Amazon Wishlist. I was absolutely bowled over. I always have to read every book at least twice before I can consider it not-new, and I can't read just new books (it's an ME thing) so this should keep me excited about having books of newness for at least three months, if not longer.
It was good having mum about for a few days. We've always talked lots. As a kid, she would tuck me in to bed every night and we'd chat for a few minutes. It was my opportunity to talk, as there was no getting a word in edgeways with my sister about. In sixth form, my Thursday morning free period was designated as our Cream Cake Day. When I lived in my little flat, I would come over to use the washing machine and stay for a cuppa and a bit of a chat about nothing very much at all. When I got sick, we had a cup of tea most days, and it added routine and a strong element of familiarity to a world which had been turned upside down. Since I've moved to Warwickshire, we still email or speak on the phone if we have anything particular to say... but it was nice to once again just sit and enjoy a quiet, non-pressured chatter with each other.
That said, it was also nice when mum had left, to be able to come home from work and fall apart by myself, without feeling that I had to put a sociable face on. I love my mum but we probably shouldn't live together.
The people at work gave me cake and flowers, which made me squee with delight. Steve is getting me a watch, just as soon as we actually have a spare half-hour to go into town together so I can try some on. He's also sort-of got me a combination printer/scanner/photocopier doodah, which will link to our wireless network and allow us to print from anywhere in the house. He says this doesn't count as a birthday present though, since it's for both of us to use and it wasn't wrapped, he just happened to buy it the evening before my birthday. I think it counts though. It was definitely a surprise - he only went out for a pint of milk.
So far being 27 isn't much different from being 26, except it's increased that feeling of being stuck in a rut.
The New Year fireworks were a resounding success, with the only casualty being one of L's gloves which got singed by a lighter. Then Steve and I enjoyed one day to rest, one day back at work, and one day to get the house passably tidy in readiness for my mum to come and stay for a few days.
We got lots of nice Christmas presents from my family, including a shiny and very spiffy set of saucepans. Nice as they are, sadly, these have not been the accessibility revolution Mr Rhodes seems to think. Firstly, as you will see from their lovely little "42" diagram on that page, the recommended angles only work if you have kitchen surfaces at well below waist height. Secondly, if you watch the video, you'll see that to drain from the saucepan, you need to hold on to the knob on top of the lid as you tilt - fine when it's empty, but in a real world situation that means your fingers are right in the path of the concentrated column of steam as you drain the boiling water away. And thirdly, you actually need more strength in your arms to manipulate it than with a standard pan, because there's no way to get a two-handed grip in order to use the handle as a lever to create stability.
So don't buy them to try and make cooking easier. But, that said, they are very nice saucepans, with a lifetime guarantee. Using the variable draining-holes in the rim of the lid to release varying amounts of steam is handy. And they are fully backward-compatible with a regular colander in the normal way. ;-)
Christmas dealt with, it was just about time for my birthday, which was the main reason for mum visiting. I took down my lovely tree and packed it neatly away for next year.
Between all of them, and Christmas and my birthday, my family have bought me just about every book that was on my Amazon Wishlist. I was absolutely bowled over. I always have to read every book at least twice before I can consider it not-new, and I can't read just new books (it's an ME thing) so this should keep me excited about having books of newness for at least three months, if not longer.
It was good having mum about for a few days. We've always talked lots. As a kid, she would tuck me in to bed every night and we'd chat for a few minutes. It was my opportunity to talk, as there was no getting a word in edgeways with my sister about. In sixth form, my Thursday morning free period was designated as our Cream Cake Day. When I lived in my little flat, I would come over to use the washing machine and stay for a cuppa and a bit of a chat about nothing very much at all. When I got sick, we had a cup of tea most days, and it added routine and a strong element of familiarity to a world which had been turned upside down. Since I've moved to Warwickshire, we still email or speak on the phone if we have anything particular to say... but it was nice to once again just sit and enjoy a quiet, non-pressured chatter with each other.
That said, it was also nice when mum had left, to be able to come home from work and fall apart by myself, without feeling that I had to put a sociable face on. I love my mum but we probably shouldn't live together.
The people at work gave me cake and flowers, which made me squee with delight. Steve is getting me a watch, just as soon as we actually have a spare half-hour to go into town together so I can try some on. He's also sort-of got me a combination printer/scanner/photocopier doodah, which will link to our wireless network and allow us to print from anywhere in the house. He says this doesn't count as a birthday present though, since it's for both of us to use and it wasn't wrapped, he just happened to buy it the evening before my birthday. I think it counts though. It was definitely a surprise - he only went out for a pint of milk.
So far being 27 isn't much different from being 26, except it's increased that feeling of being stuck in a rut.
Monday, January 07, 2008
26
Happy birthday to me. Sort of. I'm beginning to think I might be karmically paying for having had such a great Christmas.
My birthday did not get off to a roaring start. I'm feeling utterly, utterly rubbish at the moment. This particular definiton of rubbish is the one where I had to cancel the plan for Steve and I to go and have a nice lunch at the Victoria Coffee House because it would have taken so much out of me that I wouldn't have been able to manage work afterwards. When you feel so rubbish that you have to cancel Exciting Plans at the level of sitting in a quiet cafe with your boyfriend... that's pretty rubbish.
I have no presents, and one card, which Steve went out to get while I was at work this afternoon. This hasn't been the worst birthday I've had, but it's a long way off being one of the better ones.
BUT, I do have cake. Let me tell you about my cake. It's good cake. I'd found a little sandwich-shop type place supplied by the same small business that made my mum's wedding cake a couple of years ago. I bought a couple of gift-boxed chocolate brownies. Some excerpts from the ingredients list on the box:
Dark couverture chocolate (32%) (min cocoa content 53.8%)
Sugar
Cocoa butter
Madagascan vanilla
Espresso coffee...
AND, there were lots of phone calls and texts. Apparently not all parts of my pressie (very mysterious!) from my family are with them yet, they were kind of hanging on and hoping, but as it is, mum says she's sent the bits they have got special delivery and they should be with me tomorrow. I am very curious.
One thing that made me super-happy was when my mum told me that my grandmother had asked for my phone number so that she could call and wish me a happy birthday. This is impressive because:
1) My grandmother really, really, really hates using the telephone and will go out of her way to avoid having to make or recieve calls. She can just about deal with calling her own kids and panics if she gets an answerphone.
2) My grandmother lives in Germany. Her English is about as good as my German, ie, Not Very and uses a great deal of mime.
So the fact of her being prepared to make a telephone call, risk the possibility of someone she doesn't know (Steve) answering it, and take her best jump at the language barrier is really quite something. However, we don't have a landline phone, so she was spared it and I got my birthday greeting from her via my mum later in the day.
Work was ok, I was very tired but as I've said before, my co-workers are really good about giving me any help I need, and for the most part it's a fairly simple if time-consuming job. I shared my cake but there's still quite a bit left over.
I think I'm going to have another, pretend birthday later in the year to make up for this one having fizzled a bit. It is possible that this is just any excuse for more cake.
My birthday did not get off to a roaring start. I'm feeling utterly, utterly rubbish at the moment. This particular definiton of rubbish is the one where I had to cancel the plan for Steve and I to go and have a nice lunch at the Victoria Coffee House because it would have taken so much out of me that I wouldn't have been able to manage work afterwards. When you feel so rubbish that you have to cancel Exciting Plans at the level of sitting in a quiet cafe with your boyfriend... that's pretty rubbish.
I have no presents, and one card, which Steve went out to get while I was at work this afternoon. This hasn't been the worst birthday I've had, but it's a long way off being one of the better ones.
BUT, I do have cake. Let me tell you about my cake. It's good cake. I'd found a little sandwich-shop type place supplied by the same small business that made my mum's wedding cake a couple of years ago. I bought a couple of gift-boxed chocolate brownies. Some excerpts from the ingredients list on the box:
Dark couverture chocolate (32%) (min cocoa content 53.8%)
Sugar
Cocoa butter
Madagascan vanilla
Espresso coffee...
AND, there were lots of phone calls and texts. Apparently not all parts of my pressie (very mysterious!) from my family are with them yet, they were kind of hanging on and hoping, but as it is, mum says she's sent the bits they have got special delivery and they should be with me tomorrow. I am very curious.
One thing that made me super-happy was when my mum told me that my grandmother had asked for my phone number so that she could call and wish me a happy birthday. This is impressive because:
1) My grandmother really, really, really hates using the telephone and will go out of her way to avoid having to make or recieve calls. She can just about deal with calling her own kids and panics if she gets an answerphone.
2) My grandmother lives in Germany. Her English is about as good as my German, ie, Not Very and uses a great deal of mime.
So the fact of her being prepared to make a telephone call, risk the possibility of someone she doesn't know (Steve) answering it, and take her best jump at the language barrier is really quite something. However, we don't have a landline phone, so she was spared it and I got my birthday greeting from her via my mum later in the day.
Work was ok, I was very tired but as I've said before, my co-workers are really good about giving me any help I need, and for the most part it's a fairly simple if time-consuming job. I shared my cake but there's still quite a bit left over.
I think I'm going to have another, pretend birthday later in the year to make up for this one having fizzled a bit. It is possible that this is just any excuse for more cake.
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