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

(lack of) mooncake curry

It's Chinese Mid-autumn festival. In Singapore it's sometimes called Mooncake festival, or Lantern festival. It's the time of year when children play with paper lanterns and birthday candles (and yet somehow I'm always the cause of any flare up). Someone told me last year that it's a celebration of the roundest full moon of the year. I can't remember who they were or if they were to be trusted. But I'll take that as the inspiration behind the spherical lanterns, round mooncakes and abundance of pomelos.

We went to Chinese Garden to see their lantern display - I think it's one of the biggest on the island. It was classic unashamed Singaporean kitsch. If you've seen this post, you might notice a theme developing - I'm drawn to the kitsch. I wouldn't say I particularly like it, but I can't take my eyes off it. I can't resist the colours. I think it might be the complete antithesis of the essence of me.

The Boss loved the whole evening. It's pretty magical when it starts to get dark. She was, however, disappointed by the absence of mooncakes - this was a strictly lantern-only affair. I reckon the absence of mooncakes was the best bit. Have you ever tried one? Like a REAL one, with the duck egg yolk in the middle that tastes like it was laid sometime around the beginning of last year? Excuse me while I turn away and take a few deep breaths... There's a Glaswegian expression that sums it up perfectly; they gi'e me the pure boak.

There was a really lame Chinese food court set up, with terrible food. I can't stress enough how unusual that is here in Singapore. Delicious, cheap hawker food, within ten paces from wherever you happen to be standing, is a basic human right here. So once we'd got home and plugged a small person's mouth with a large banana, I decided to whip something up out of the fridge/cupboard. It was a risk, but I think I created something worth repeating. It was good at 10pm last night, though to be honest we were too hungry to even taste it. But for a leisurely, solitary, leftovers lunch today, it was droolsomely delicious. Recipe after the photos (all straight out of the camera).

(lack of) mooncake curry

Makes about 4 portions
You can add more or less spice. These quantities made a mild to medium spicy sauce.

• 2 onions, sliced into half moons
• salt
• a thumb of ginger, grated
• 4 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 1 tsp coriander powder
• 1 tsp cumin powder
• 4 tsp medium curry powder
• 3 carrots, cut into large chunks
• 2 potatoes, cut into similiar chunks
• half a head of broccoli
• tin of tomatoes
• 500ml stock
• 1 cup of frozen peas
• 2 tsp garam masala powder
• small carton of coconut milk
• coriander leaves
• slivered almonds

1. fry the onions & ginger in vegetable oil in a big wok 
2. a good pinch on salt helps to stop the onions catching
3. add the garlic once the onions are quite soft
4. stir in the coriander powder, cumin powder and curry powder, and fry for a few minutes
5. add your chopped vegetables, tin of tomatoes and stock (I use a cube)
6. leave to simmer slowly for as long as it takes the carrots and tatties to be cooked (for those who need accuracy, that's precisely one preschooler bedtime. Oh, OK, about 45 minutes... ish)
7. put some basmati rice on (if you cook it the right way my way, it'll take exactly 15 minutes)
8. add the peas and garam masala and cook for another 5 minutes or so to cook the peas through. I read somewhere once that garam masala, being a mixture of ground toasted spices, has already been cooked so you can happily stir it through at the end without worrying about harsh flavours. every day's a school day eh?
9. turn the heat down and stir in the coconut milk and coriander leaves
10. let it warm through and serve on rice with almonds sprinkled on the top - or better, leave in the fridge overnight and eat the next day with warm naan...

Sorry, it has all been eaten - no pictures. But as you can imagine, it looks a lot like a plate of curry. And the best bit? NO MOONCAKE.

mouthbreathing in aircon

When I started this blog about six weeks ago, I was in a happy place, and I wanted to connect with other positive, cheerful people. I made a personal editorial policy that this would, under no circumstances, become a place to vent frustrations or get angry. Everyone has quite enough on their own plates without me clambering up onto my high horse. But I'm afraid I need to break that rule. Thankfully the editor-in-chief can't sack me.

Boy, have I had a bugger of a week. My husband had to work some 24 hour shifts over a weekend, and I started to get sick. The streaming snots and sneezes. Mouthbreathing in aircon is misery, and mouthbreathing outdoors when it hovers around 30C and 80% humidity is not much better. Then there was a major safety issue in our apartment. To say that we are waging a mini "Erin Brockovich" style campaign from our coffee table kind of explains the situation. How this will end I don't know. Perhaps we'll go back to the UK over it (perhaps we'll get sent back!). Perhaps someone will grow a moral conscience and do the right thing. Whatever happens, it's exhausting. Someone taking liberties with my family's safety and then telling me that it is not their problem makes me feel helpless, like we don't matter. Like my child doesn't matter. It feels like a personal insult. I'm finding it very hard to keep any sense of perspective. I was feeling pretty homesick anyway, and now I'm just broken.

And then I heard Christmas music in a shopping mall this morning. I suspect you can imagine how much this pi$$ed me off. No ol' blue eyes, NOT THIS MORNING.

Amidst my phlegm and frustration, I've been trying desperately to throw myself into things I enjoy. But this may have backfired. In just one week I've nearly finished my Veera scarf. But I think I've ruined it in an invisible way. You know in Like Water for Chocolate how Tita infuses the food she cooks with her own emotions? Well, my scarf has been created out of rapid boiling maternal anger. The stitches are perfect and the colours just as beautiful as they were on the ball, but I think the piece as a whole is fuming with pent-up frustration.

On a more positive note, I've been trying to entertain The Boss with a very old copy of Little Old Mrs Pepperpot, a book that I absolutely adored when I was small. My mother-in-law dug this copy out of a long-forgotten bookshelf the last time we were in London. The binding has gone and we're having to handle it like a precious relic. Each time we open the browned pages, my girl takes a long deep sniff of the stale old paper, which she says smells like honey. And she proudly presented her favourite red ribbon for use as the bookmark. I'm trying to treasure the simplicity of a little girl having a favourite ribbon. But it's not easy this week.

When she asked why the book said 3'- on the cover, we started explaining about old money, and how Granny had bought this book a long time ago. With a look of amazement on her face she whispered in disbelief "does that mean that Granny was in the olden days?!". I can only imagine her visions of Granny buying three shilling books from all the pirates and pharaohs and dinosaurs that we've talked about in the context of the "olden days". Crikey, I bet she thinks that Granny's met the baby Jesus.

Linking along with the lovely Small things Yarn Along. I hope you, and they, can indulge and forgive me my rant. Will try not to do it again.

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!