Cake Countdown 1: Deeply Spiced Carrot Cake

There are elven weeks left of the term at the school where I work and these are my last eleven weeks as I have handed in my notice. By the time Christmas arrives, I will be in Europe. As my farewell countdown I am making a cake a week for work.

Cake 1 was a deeply spiced carrot cake. A large amount of ground ginger and cinnamon make this a warming, comforting cake perfect with a cup of tea. There is icing too; a cream cheese and yoghurt affair which stops everything being too sweet. The first time I made this I did it in two loaf pans and kept one simple, which means I didn´t add any spices or cranberries or nuts. Just carrot. The second one had a load of cranberries, nuts and spices. I changed this from the original recipe which says you need a mixer, but I made it with a wooden spoon. The second time, I baked one 22 cm round cake. In place of muscovado sugar I used light brown and, in the icing yoghurt, instead of sour cream. I used about one cup more carrot than they suggest because I had grated it and I am glad I did because otherwise I think it would have been too cakey and not carroty enough. The amount of spice they use is pretty small, so I upped and as usual didn´t really measure it; I just let my nose guide me.

Adapted from America´s Test Kitchen Cookery book

4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups canola oil
2 cups flour
1 and a bit cups pecans/ walnuts
1 and a bit cups dried cranberries
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder (more if you don´t live at the top of a mountain)
pinch of salt

Beat the eggs vigorously until they go a bit frothy and add the sugar. Beat some more. Take out all your aggression on it. Drizzle in the oil. be quick about it, you´re not making mayonnaise, and keep beating. Then beat a bit more. In a big bowl with a big wooden spoon, this takes no time at all. add the carrot, nuts and cranberries. Mix again. Add the flour and baking powder and salt. Now stir, you don´t want to beat too violently once the flour goes in or else the cake will be tough.

Pour into prepared baking tin and bake for about an hour at gas 3.

Icing
To one packet of cream cheese (8oz) add about 50 mls of natural yoghurt, a splash of vanilla and enough icing sugar to make a thick icing. Taste it to see if you like it. Spread on and stick it in the fridge - the icing is good once it´s dried out a bit.

Slice thickly and eat with a cuppa.

Big Fat Cake

That was what I wanted to make yesterday and this is what I did:

The recipe was based on using one pack of butter and six eggs. This seemed like a good starting point and I remember vaguely a recipe that uses those quantities. The flour, sugar and yoghurt were as I think I remembered the quantities to be. Actually I didn´t measure the yoghurt at all. Once the butter was soft, I added 300g of sugar and then the eggs. After that, a load of vanilla and about really approximately, 200ml of natural yoghurt. I just added enough until the mixture was as runny I as thought it should be. It looked like it had curdled, but no matter because once 350g of flour was in, it was all fine.

I baked it at gas 2 for about an hour. My oven has no thermostat or regulator, so I think it must start at gas 2 and slowly work it´s way up to about gas 4. Anyway, the knife came out clean. I baked it in a ring mold. I think it would work as two loaf cakes or a 25 cm round cake.

This morning it was just right with hot milky coffee. This afternoon it will be great with a cup of tea. Toasted it would work with jam and it could also be a drizzle cake. In the fridge I have some thick orangey syrup that I made a while ago and I am thinking of pouring that over.

Next time I am going to up the butter

Washing Machine

I was asked by Jamie which cycle on the washing machine was the roughest out of easy care, wool and delicates. The explanation I gave was that easy care wold be the roughest with wool being a cool wash and delicates cool with less spin cycles involved. This at least is how I understand it.

The question made me think about my washing machine. As you do. Cleaning clothes has been quite a different experience since I have been living in Independence street. The house I rent was unfurnished, so I bought a cheap washing machine as I knew that faced with the prospect of washing by hand, I would probably just end up buying new clothes. It cost about 40 pounds, brand new.

Until it was delivered I hadn´t really considered how it would work or where to install it. The house itself is best described as cobbled together. Recently, when thinking about installing some kind of screen on the door to keep flies out, we discovered that the only way they could have put the door in was to hang the door before the roof was put on. It should come as no surprise then, that there are no fittings for a washing machine inside the house.

Once that discovery had been made, it dawned on me that the washing machine itself cannot be installed into any fittings. There are no electric bits or automatic functions. It is an upright cylinder with a beater which sticks up in the centre and twists from side-to-side to bash the clothes around. The amount of time for the bashing is controlled by a wind up timer, but there is no way of controlling the ferocity of the bashing.

Filling it up requires a hose pipe and so the water is always cold. To get the water out you unclip a flexible plastic tube and let it hang down so the water runs out and the plants get a drink. You have to remember to re-clip this tube when you are filling it up or else the water just trickles away. To connect it to the power an extension cable is dangled out of the window, precariously close to the water. There is no spin cycle, so all wringing out is done by hand.

Apart from that, it is bubblegum pink.

Bread

There are few things more disappointing than a recipe which doesn´t work; the birthday cake that doesn´t rise; the expensive roast which is tough and tasteless. Once you have read a recipe, mulled it over and decided to make it you already have a preconceived notion of what you are expecting to taste. Sometimes the product disappoints not because it was bad, but because it just doesn´t live up to your imagination. The recipe, the words of another, described a final product which was different when conjured in your imagination.

While visiting some friends last week someone had found himself in the situation where it had been necessary to tell people-I-don´t-know about me. Apparently lots of questions had been asked and curiosity had been aroused. A snippet of information like that awoke my own curious nature. What had they wanted to know? And more urgently, what had been the answers given? The description I got of the conversations which had taken place was of course, woefully inadequate. Is there no man who can communicate with sufficient accuracy what was actually said? What of their gene for reiterating a conversation word for exaggerated word, eye movement for painstaking eye movement? I became slightly obsessed with which adjectives might have been used and what the overall impression might have been.

Sometime after the futile cross examination had finished and the matter had been dropped I was casually handed a mobile phone and asked to type in my bread recipe. Last week´s host had asked for it. Clearly this important detail had been overlooked in the description of what-had-been-said. Certainly my cooking and baking must have been mentioned. The request for a recipe leads one to the conclusion that it was revealed in a positive light. Can I deduce that I was depicted as a ´good cook´? No further information has been disclosed.

Being talked about is an odd circumstance where one has no control whatsoever over the impression strangers are forming of you. It sets precedents for a real meeting; you are not entering the scene as an unknown quantity but of a talked about entity which people have had time to chew over and form opinions about. Rather like the recipe which fails to impress the person-you´ve-heard-so-much-about could turn out to be a spectacular disappointment.

And so it is that I attempt to reproduce how I make my bread. Here I recreate the bread making process with decidedly more accuracy, clarity and specificity than the account of the conversation of which I was the topic. I do so in the hope that the final product makes a good impression.

The thing to do is not skimp on time. It doesn´t require a great deal of work, just a lot of waiting around which makes it ideal for fitting around a busy schedule; you do a bit then leave it for ages, do a bit more then leave again.

Get one cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of instant yeast and a cup of water. Mix them together and leave overnight. This is your sponge.

The next day put 3 cups of flour in a big bowl. Add another teaspoon of yeast, just over one cup of tepid water (the exact amount depends on the flour, the humidity, all kinds of things which cannot be explained) and a couple of teaspoons of salt. Mix and knead. tNow leave it for about half an hour.

Get the sponge and add it to the dough. Knead them together. This takes quite a while, but keep going until it becomes a lovely shiny cohesive ball. Put it into an oiled bowl and cover.

Leave for an hour. Punch it down and turn it over, then leave it for another hour. Do this all over again. If you want, do it again but turning twice should be enough.

Shape the dough into two American football shaped loaves. The final wait. Put them on to the trays they will be baked on, sprinkle some flour over and cover them with a clean tea towel. One more hour to wait.

Once they have risen, score a line down the top. A Stanley knife is good for this. Whatever you do, don´t use a blunt knife because you´ll just knock all the air out. Bake them for about 45 minutes in a hot oven. I estimate this to be about 220° as I had my oven on gas mark 3 (EDIT: my oven is very hot at gas mark 3. After reading the comment and doing some research, I would say the temperature is around 200° celsius, 350° farenheit and gas mark 5 in a normal, properly calibrated oven. Your oven should be hot, not tepid).

Let it cool before you cut it. Eat with copious amounts of butter.

Rocky Road (for a hiker)

Melt all of the following in a pan over a low heat (no need for bowls hovering over hot water as long as you stir it and don´t turn it up full blast): 2 bars of Lindt 70%, I bag of Hershey´s semi-sweet chocolate chips, 200g butter and a dribble of honey or Golden Syrup if you want. There is no danger that it won´t be sweet enough, but it will help to give it a chewy texture rather than just be hard. Add chopped marshmallows, cranberries, peanuts, and smashed up rich tea biscuits. You want to add the marshmallows in batches so that some of them melt completely and others stay in bits. The mixture should be almost dry, so keep adding stuff until it looks like you have put enough in, then add a bit more. Put it in a tray lined with foil or paper and squash it down. Stick it in the freezer. Melt some more chocolate, milk or white. Toast some coconut. Top the now cool-ish chocolate extravaganza with the melted chocolate and coconut. Put it in the fridge and forbid the sweet toothed hiker from stealing it.

This makes enough for about 50 normal people or one sweet toothed hiker.