buttons

I am lucky enough to be a stay at home mum. I get to spend all the time in the world with my girl - something that I know many women aren't able to do. I chose this, and I try to value it every day. I have a very generous 15hrs a week to "get stuff done" thanks to a divine local nursery school. But once the daily grocery shopping, cooking, washing and cleaning are finished, that doesn't seem to amount to all that much.

Just occasionally I wish that - by virtue of a paid job, nearby relative, or live-in maid domestic helper (lets not even get into that debate just now) - I could, just once, throw my hands up in the air and sod off to go and do my own thing without a backward glance (...or a quick look down at my watch for the ever-looming school run/babysitter deadline).

I realised last week that there have only been two nights in nearly five years where I have slept away from my daughter. On the one hand, how incredibly lucky am I? (And this hand is definitely the winning hand, I know it holds the top trumps.) But on the other, I felt the need to scream for my lost independence.

But I can't do that because I live in a block of flats and it would've woken the neighbours. How bloody frustrating.

If you've ever felt this way, and you're the parent of a preschooler, I've found a sort-of short-term solution. It's simpler than you would ever have imagined. I can't magic up a childminding granny, a full-time Mrs Mop, or an undemanding morning job in a divine local boutique (aaah dreamy)... I don't have the cash or the work permit to make any of those things happen.

But I can do buttons.

Seriously, if you don't have a tin of buttons, go to your local cheapo craft shop and buy the biggest mixed bargain bag they have. They induce remarkably long periods of contented, educational quiet time, during which I retreat to my room to knit and read. Knitting and reading isn't exactly asserting my independence to the world, but sometimes a bit of peace and quiet is all I need to restore perspective.

And when I start to crave her company again, I can always go and join in with the colour sorting, the threading, the adding, the size grading, the tiddlywinking, the endless mesmerising possibilities...

Buttons.

They've been known to save my day.

cake: the origin of the species

ev·o·lu·tion
[ev-uh-loo-shuhn] noun. change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation

I have this cake recipe, no in fact, I'd go so far as to say I have the cake recipe. I expect most home cooks have one. It symbolises the purest essence of the art form. It needs no introduction. It's not Orange Cassava Cake, or Simnel Cake, or Lemon Drizzle Cake, or Date and Walnut Cake...

It's just cake.

It was provided by my Granny as the first recipe for my first cook book. It was the recipe my Mum used to teach me the basic principles of baking. It was the cake delivered by emotional parents for my eighth birthday, a month after I started boarding school. It was every birthday cake we ever had before or since. It was the cake that turned my older brother on to baking. It was the recipe that he was looking for on the shelf when he yelled at me for daring to taking my cook book away to university with me. I suspect it's the cake he uses to teach his new wife how to bake.

It's the cake that always welcomes us home from wherever we have been. It's the cake I've made over and over with my wee brother whenever we've run out of other ideas. It's the cake I make for my husband when he just needs cake. It's the cake I've learnt to expect when any of my close family says "I made a cake!". It's the cake I teach my daughter how to bake.

I must have made it a hundred times or more. Every motion is precious and memorable for me. But it does evolve through the generations. Slowly and in the most minute ways; but that's evolution for you. For example, where the recipe instructs 6 tbsp of boiling water, I've always opted not to stop the trickle of water from the kettle between spoonfuls - the inaccurate addition of "a bit extra" water making the cake moister.

While baking this cake together today, The Boss added another intangible detail to the recipe. When I was showing her how to test whether the cake was ready with a skewer, she said "it's like the cake is sick and you're taking it's temperature to see if it's better". I'll never be able to bake this cake again without thinking of that metaphor, and I suspect (and hope) that the image will stay with her forever.

When I was growing up, I had a penchant for coffee-flavoured buttercream icing, and it had to be smoothed on with a spatula and then run over with the tines of a fork in wavy lines. But my daughter prefers to go with Granny's original chocolate icing. With one small modification: in her eyes, real cakes MUST have sprinkles.

It's evolved.

If you don't have a good basic cake recipe, one that defines the very essence of the word cake, please be my guest. It's not big and it's not clever, it's just cake.

cake
no apologies for the imperial measures - that's part of the charm for me. If it matters, please feel free to do the conversion yourself

• 2oz cocoa
• 6tbsp boiling water
• 6oz butter
• 6oz caster sugar
• 6oz self-raising flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• 4 eggs
  

1. line a 7" round cake tin with parchment
2. preheat your oven to 325F
3. mix the cocoa and the water together into a paste in a small bowl
4. cream the butter and the sugar in a mixing bowl
5. sift in the flour and baking powder
6. add the eggs and the cocoa
7. blend
8. bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean

icing - beat the following together until blended

• 1oz melted plain chocolate
• 6oz icing sugar
• 2oz butter
• 1tbsp milk
• 1tbsp cocoa 

the wee lebowski

The only personal outdoor space in our rented apartment is a patio measuring about 15m by 2m. So narrow that we can hardly fit a table and chair on it, and we certainly can't hoola hoop. Lined on one side with glass windows and on the other with glass balcony panels, we're hesitant even to play bat-and-ball games. About a year ago, a dear friend pointed out that our patio's not much use for, well... anything. Except perhaps a bowling alley.

I must've mumbled something about going to a toy shop to buy some skittles and, being the good thrifty Doric quine that she is, my friend choked on her coffee and told me to wise up and use plastic bottles full of water. She's clever and imaginative and... in Scotland. My friends: I miss them.

Anyway, I'd quite forgotten all about her suggestion until I saw this post by minieco about making ink from old felt tip pens. Coincidentally The Boss had, just the same week, sheepishly coveted some grossly cheap-and-nasty plastic skittles in the supermarket. So I figured that with a bit of judicious bottled drink slurping, we could make coloured bowling pins for (almost) nothing.

Now, minieco's tutorials are always a gauzy haze of rainbow-coloured perfection (just look at those pictures; amazing) and my life is very far removed from that. But here is my haphazard version. The low effort:high fun ratio with this project makes it well worth a try (particularly if you have a hopeless, bowling-alley-shaped patio).

cut off labels and fill with water

dig out any and all scratchy or dried up felt-tip pens and drop in (de-lidded)

the motley crew

the following morning (remove pens with chopsticks!)

tape up the lids with electrical tape

find a ball

jamie's 30 minute meals: the secret to success

Despite the fact that Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals was never on the telly here, the craze for the book seemed to be global last Christmas. Nearly everyone I know in Singapore has a copy (though I've yet to meet anyone who's tried it, and my neighbour's is still in cellophane).

I set myself a little New Year challenge to work my way through it, and like most New Year challenges, it waned pretty quickly. But I'm proud to say that I've done about a dozen of them, and I've really enjoyed the (slightly frenzied) process. They all took more like an hour, but that's OK, I'm not in any particular hurry, and if I do each one a few times I'll get much quicker. In fact I'll defend any of the criticisms levelled at this book on the Amazon rant feedback pages because (a) they taste so damn fine that (b) my child eats it all.

Now I said that I had never managed one of the meals within 30 minutes before... until last night. The secret to my success? Enlist the help of a child. Seriously! There was nothing about the dessert in this meal that my four year old could not handle. Once I had weighed out the ingredients, she mixed them, then she spooned them into pastry cases alternating jam and frangipane mixture, and I put them in the oven. I'd actually say we managed the preparation for this meal comfortably within 30 minutes. And it was d-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s.

I hope you don't mind my not writing out the recipes here - if you know the book, you'll know that it would mean a lot of typing. But if you do have a copy, and if you've been nervous about giving it a go (or put off by the global marketing hype and ensuing backlash), I urge you to give this a try: Pregnant Jools's pasta with crunchy chicory & watercress salad and little frangipane tarts. You can see the website for the book here.

Seriously, give it a try. If a four year old can do it...
 

mixing the frangipane

filling the (shop-bought) pastry cases

actually, I couldn't get pastry, so this is some mysterious thing called graham cracker crumb (?)

just a bag of mixed salad rather than the chicory & watercress which I can't get

meanwhile I was making the easiest pasta sauce in the world

et voila, The Boss' first puddies that she made (almost) all by herself!

sugar & snaps: part 3 marshmallows

[Previously on sugar & snaps... part 1 and part 2: turkish delight]

I have some life rules. They're all quite personal to me, but one or two might also apply to you. Currently, the list includes:

1. there is always room for dessert
2. if I can knit/floss without a moment's preparation, it's time to put on more/bigger rings
3. never attempt to go grey gracefully in my 30s again (disgracefully in my 40s maybe, but for now pass me the sodding bottle)
4. never, ever read a Rastamouse book aloud to my daughter in public

After a wince-making storytime in an airport departure lounge recently, number four is definitely the most important on this list. My Jamaican patois isn't bad. It's insultingly bad. Shudder. But (moving swiftly on) no self-respecting list has only four items on it, does it? Thankfully, making marshmallows has furnished me with a fifth, to which I firmly suggest you pay heed.

I had to decide whether to go with the Hope & Greenwood recipe for "mallows d'amour" or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's marshmallow recipe from the Guardian website way back in 2006. If I was being a smarty pants I'd say that I chose the latter because the very idea of presenting something called "mallows d'amour" to my husband makes me a little bit sick in my mouth, but actually I chose HFW's recipe because I wasn't confident about some of the substitutions I would have had to make to the Hope & Greenwood version.

Fundamentally the principles are the same though (for details, go to HFW's Guardian recipe link above). And luckily this list does have five parts.

1. You bring sugar to the hard ball stage.
HFW says 122C, H&G say 127C - I went with H&G on this decision because, although Mr HFW is a bit of a idol in our house, I reckon the people who run a sweet shop probably know more about sugar.

2. Meanwhile, you dissolve some gelatine powder.
I pimped this with some pink colouring and rose essence in a nod to Hope & Greenwood, but HFW doesn't bother.

3. Also, you whip some egg whites.

4. You pour the gelatine into the hot sugar.

5. You pour the gelatine/sugar into the egg whites, and beat.
HFW says to beat until it's thick but just pourable, H&G say to beat for 25-30 minutes. I managed 15 minutes and then my mixer started making bad noises and I figured a batch of marshmallows wasn't worth breaking my food processor over.

That's basically it. You pour the gloop into a prepared tin and let it set before cutting it into squares which you coat with sifted icing sugar and cornflour. The results were simply amazing. Light as a feather, Johnson's-baby-lotion pink, and with that perfect ever-so-slight crust around each piece. Truly, I thought that last week's turkish delight was a personal triumph, but it pales into insignificance compared with these marshmallows.

Perfection? There must be a catch. Well, yes, there is. And this is where life rule number five comes in. To summarise:

1. always room for afters
2. wear as many rings as impede knitting/flossing
3. don't go with the grey
4. no Rastamouse in public
5. NEVER add stuff to boiling sugar in anything smaller than a cauldron

Hugh's fairly-witless instruction was that when you pour the gelatine into the sugar it will "bubble up a bit". A word of caution, making marshmallows is simple and everyone will think you're a genius, but unless you use the biggest pan you've ever seen, this will end in a bloody disaster.

I started with a really big pan for my sugar, but then I changed it to a smaller one because my sugar thermometer is only about five inches long, so I couldn't peg it to the side of the deep pan and still reach the sugar. Big mistake. The bit where it "bubbles up a bit" is like a potion out of Harry Potter, pink froth just kept coming and coming. And of course it's pink froth at 127C and full of gelatine. You can't put it over a basin because the plastic would probably melt, and you can't put it over your sink because you'll block it solid. In fact it's so hot you can't do anything except watch in horror as it pours over the side and burns immediately on your hob top. The house is full of smoke and the smell of burning, alarms are going off and a pleasurable morning has turned into August in North London.

The burning mixture did smell exactly like a thousand marshmallows singe-ing on a bbq. Every cloud has a silver lining I suppose.

I know, the pictures don't look that bad, but trust me, you would not BELIEVE how sticky this stuff is. Once the mess had cooled enough for me to start the clean-up operation, any gloop on the cooker that hadn't burnt solid was the exact consistency of warm chewing gum. When it's stuck in someone's hair.

It took an hour and a half to clean the hob, during which time I vowed that no matter how good the final marshmallows, I would NEVER do this again. But at that point I hadn't tasted them...

I will definitely be doing this again - that's how good they are.

Linking up with the lovelies at Life Made Lovely Monday, Gingerbread's Sweet Saturday and Happy Homemaker UK's Post of the Month Club

sugar & snaps: part 2 turkish delight

Following last week's post I’m ready to give turkish delight another go. It’s taken about three years to recover emotionally from the last attempt, but I have every confidence in this Hope and Greenwood recipe, as printed in oh comely magazine. I hope neither of those enchanting companies mind my reproducing and commenting on the recipe here; I’m a big fan, I’ll link to your websites at every opportunity, and I won’t make any money from it. Promise. Come to think of it, I haven’t made any money from anything in ages.

So, rose and pistachio turkish delight...

Note: this isn’t something to do with the kids. In fact, I wouldn’t even do it when they’re in the house. Boiling sugar scares the beegees out of me.

You will need:
groundnut oil, for greasing
900g granulated sugar *
1tbsp lemon juice
175g cornflour
1tsp cream of tartar
2tbsp rose syrup
2-3 drops pink food colouring
100g shelled pistachios
icing sugar and cornflour, to dust

* aka: a shed-load of sugar. I was stunned at how much.

one
Line a 20cm square baking tin 4cm deep on all sides with baking parchment and lightly oil it with groundnut oil.
Ha. This bit I can do. I’m totally on a roll.

two
Place the sugar, lemon juice and 340ml of water in a pan and put it over a low heat. Stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Bring it to the boil without stirring and slowly, using your sugar thermometer, bring the mixture up to 118C. This will take about 15 minutes.
Okay, so now I know where I went so catastrophically wrong last time. I am far, far, far too impatient to wait for the sugar reached the right temperature. It took ages. Perhaps my hob heat was a bit low, but I was there for at least half an hour, if not longer. So I’m already a big fan of my sugar thermometer. She's a disciplinarian.

three
Meanwhile, in a separate pan (this one must be really deep and truly heavy bottomed), place the cornflour, 570ml of cold water and the cream of tartar. Give the mixture a good stir and place over a low heat.
Just like making gloop back when I used to run creative workshops for the under 1s. (What? You've never played with cornflour gloop before? With an under 1? Trust me, gloop + baby = fun.)

four
Keep stirring so that there are no lumps (it’s like making cheese sauce). Bring to the boil and beat quickly until the mixture looks like wallpaper paste. Take off the heat.
Hmm. Never wallpapered before. Don’t know what wallpaper paste looks like. Mine looks like this.

five
Place the cornflour mixture back on the heat. As soon as the sugar mixture has reached 118C, pour it over the cornflour mixture. Stir it well – it will look like an ocean of icebergs – and if any lumps persist, whisk them out with a metal whisk. Keeping the heat low, bring the mixture to a geyser-plopping simmer. Let it simmer like this for an hour.
Ocean of icebergs? Not quite (not that I’ve seen one). And by the way it doesn’t smell very good at this stage, very starchy. Bringing to the geyser plop takes quite a while too (not that I’ve seen a geyser either). This isn’t something to try if you’ve anywhere to go in a hurry. My un-airconditioned kitchen has now hit 30 degrees and I'm getting ratty. You'd probably picked up on that.

six
Take the pan off the heat, stir in the rose syrup, the pink food colouring and the pistachio nuts. This will turn the colour from a strange and unappetising yellow to a pleasant pink. Pour the pink blubber into the prepared tin and leave the Turkish delight to cool and set overnight.
So here’s where my guess work comes into play as I could only get rose essence and that super strong pink colouring paste. The mixture tastes quite nice and lemonish already, so I don’t want to overdo the rose essence. I try half a teaspoon. With the colouring paste I dip a skewer in the little packet and then swirl it about in the turkish delight. It goes a pretty violent pink. I think I’ll leave it at that. I have slightly less than 100g of pistachios, can’t imagine where the rest of the plate went during the past two hours.

seven
Once set, cut into squares and dust with equal amounts of icing sugar and cornflour sifted together.
It worked! And not only that, but it worked beautifully and lusciously and deliciously and rosily. And it gave me quite the most sublime spoon-licking experience of my life (like I said, this is not a recipe to do with the kids around).

The only thing I'm not sure about is how to get the sort of "dryness" around each piece of jelly (as you find in the authentic stuff), so that the powder coats the cube rather than sinking into the jellyish wetness after a few minutes and making it sludgy. Perhaps it has something to do with the ambient temperature of my flat, which never drops below about 27C. I was going to give most of this away as gifts, but this powder/sludge interface won't be a good look by the time I see them next week. Hey ho, we'll have to eat it all ourselves.

Now if you’ll just excuse me, I think I need to go and floss my teeth... and de-sticky my camera.


I believe this recipe came from Hope and Greenwood’s book Life is Sweet.
I think I might need to find me a copy.


Linking in with life made lovely monday and sweet shot tuesday.