The Way of the Wombat

One of the ladies from church married her partner on Tuesday. They are both 70, and only wanted a small ceremony followed a small celebration (less than 20 people) at Milntown.

Diane asked if I would make them a simple sponge cake as a wedding cake. I said I would, as my gift to them, provided that they really didn't want anything too complicated, and showed her a picture of the one I did for my daughter's wedding.



When Gillian, Diane's fiancée, saw it she asked if I could do them almost the same thing, just on one layer, as she loved it; as long as my daughter didn't mind. D-d didn't mind at all.

So I ended up doing my second wedding cake - to the same design as the first one! Here it is just before it left my kitchen;




Our weather for the days preceding the wedding were in the upper 20s (centigrade) - which was certainly too hot for buttercream, and even the thin fondant layer, to hold shape and not just melt and run down the sides leaving nothing but two plain sponges and a sticky sweet puddle! So between each step the cake went back into the fridge - and I did worry that that might have dried the actual cake bit out.

So I was very pleased to get an e-mail about a meeting, which was from someone who had been to the reception and, instead of starting with meeting related stuff, began Your cake was truly amazing - both flavour and appearance!

Tomorrow is D-d's birthday. We are going out for a meal and so she won't be home to have cake.

But during conversation on Sunday, when she took me out for lunch, I managed to volunteer to make her one to take to work with her. And then there was this, well it was more a pattern than a recipe, that I wanted to try...

So under the cut is a step by step of cake construction. ( Read more... )

It's a good job I did it last night - my back is playing up this evening and I really wouldn't have had the patience.

I've just had one of those moments when you realise you've turned into your own mother.

I was baking some gingerbread, for a cake stall at church in aid of the Philippines Appeal, and I looked at the tins I was using. They are very tatty and rusted. This isn't a problem, as I line them. But I suddenly thought how very old they looked - just as I remember my mother using very old cake tins when I was younger. And I realised that these ones I use regularly are ones I bought about... um... 30 years ago.

My mum's 'very old tins' were probably not that old.

Here is a picture of the two gingerbreads - as you can see, the cake didn't come into contact with the elderly tins!

We are currently in the midst of the TT motorcycle festival which, for me, means I am making what feels like industrial quantities of carrot cake - not to mention chocolate cake, chocolate brownies, flapjack, gingerbread... We sell filled baps, hot pasty, and lots and lots of home-made cakes at church to the spectators, as our church grounds are an excellent spot to watch the racing.

So this was yesterday's baking in my house -



That was the third 18 piece carrot cake I've made, and I will make at least one more. The chocolate cakes behind, together, come to the same size but somehow, on that angle, they look a lot smaller. I know now that these are 'sheet cakes' - thank you bojojoti - in this case dark chocolate with chocolate frosting and fudge chunks.

I've also done 3 trays of chocolate brownie, 2 trays of oat flapjack, and one of gingerbread the same size as the carrot cake. And D-d has also been turning out her specialities - cherry frangipan, fruit flapjack, rocky road and tiffin. I reckon, just between the two of us, our personal cake sales will raise about £170 - and our input is about 10% of the whole!

For something completely different, there are a few pictures I took a week or more ago, just of the sea, and a stairway to nowhere... ( Read more... )

I hope you have all had a good Easter Weekend.

Under the cut are a few pictures ranging, as my subject line says, from a rough sea to a chocolate trifle! Also a couple of pictures of my Easter Eggs...

( Click here for the pics... )

...as a crumb off the old cake!

These are some sticky toffee cupcakes made by D-d for friends at work - well, actually they are the four she sent up to S2C and me.




They are very nice. I don't have the recipe, but I think I will ask her for it!

I've been quite busy so far this weekend. Some Fridays I just want to come home and flop - others I have an urge to be productive! This was one of the latter.

So - I did the trolley shopping on the way home from work, put on a load of washing and drying whilst I put it away, mixed up dark fruit loaves whilst dinner was in the oven, and put them into the warm oven after dinner. Then, whilst they were in the oven I produced the prayer leaflets for church.

All this before S2C got up at 8pm to get ready for work! When he went out I changed our bedding, emptied the washer/dryer and put a load more in on timer so that it would be ready to sort and hang things to dry at breakfast time... and finally wrote 400 words of the next chapter of The Valinor Trail.

I rather think all the previous activities were a form of procrastination - it is surprising what you can fill your time with when you should be organising the ideas into sentences and paragraphs!

Actually I really did need to bake - we are having a Mariners' Service at church next week...( Read more... )

Anyway - whilst others will make sandwiches, cook chicken drumsticks, and so on, I will make fruit loaves and gingerbread, possibly a cherry & banana cake too. The best thing about the particular fruit loaves, and gingerbread, is that they will improve in the cake-tins until next weekend - so I can bake now, whilst I'm in the mood.

chaotic_binky and I were discussing cakes, and bread & butter pudding, not to mention bread pudding which is a totally different thing, in another place - and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to post the fruitloaf and gingerbread recipes here. Both are very easy and pretty much fool proof - and very tasty.

So I have put the recipes ( Under this cut... )

It is, of course, very easy to half that second recipe and just make a normal sized cake!

Also - depending on what is in the store cupboard, it has been made with all syrup, half syrup & half treacle, all treacle instead of the syrup, and even about 2/3 syrup to 1/3 honey when I had no treacle to pad the remains of the syrup up! All taste good, just a little different each time.

You can see that the two have a common root, in the method used to make them. The other thing you will notice is that one recipe is older than the other - one is in ounces and the other in grams - I have scales that weigh in both, and can think pretty well in either, so I don't bother converting recipes, just use whatever it's in!

Anyone interested in the difference between bread and butter pudding and bread pudding - or their mysterious, richer, relative the Wet Nelly - just say - and I might post about those too.

Actually, I will probably post pictures of the baking tomorrow, too.