Cake - Baked With Love

“This morning I resolved to bake

A Mary Berry drizzle cake.

Down your way the sun may sizzle,

Round here there is heavy drizzle.”

 
                                                         Pam Ayres, from Twitter

 

We have eaten the last crumbs of my home made Simnel cake. It lasted surprisingly long, for any cake in our house, but we were also working our way through an abundant supply of hot cross buns. They were on special offer of two packs for half price or something like that and we couldn’t resist. The thing is, there are only the two of us living here and a limited time to eat them. Actually, no one else in the family likes anything with fruit in, so we weren’t obliged to share. For visiting family, I made some plain buns with icing on top, which my grandchildren call ‘Nanna cake’ and enjoy devouring.

My Nanna Hetty made the best currant cake I’ve ever known. She had it in a tin in her yellow kitchen and always gave me a piece after I’d eaten all my tea. She passed away when I was eight. My memories of her are precious. I loved spending school holidays at her bungalow and she enjoyed looking after me. My currant buns are good, but not a patch on her delicious recipe.

We were so lucky to have the generous gift of a perfect wedding cake. Three tiers of dark, rich fruit cake baked and decorated by my friend’s mother.  It was a beautiful work of art and tasted divine.

Last year, on the run up to Hallowe’en, I was given some home-grown pumpkins and looked for something to make instead of pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup. I discovered a recipe for pumpkin loaf, a sweet, dessert bread which was equally good plain or buttered and with or without dried fruit.

Home-made cake is the best. I have made Victoria Sponge birthday cakes for my children and now I make them for my grandchildren. I tell them that I put lots of love into the mixture to make them extra special. I hope I’m also baking happy memories, like my Nanna Hetty did.

 

I found this poem,

 

Cakes in the Staffroom by Brian Moses

 

Nothing gets teachers more excited
than cakes in the staffroom at break time.
Nothing gets them more delighted
than the sight of plates
piled high with jammy doughnuts
or chocolate cake

It’s an absolute stampede
as the word gets round quickly,

And it’s “Oooh” these are really delicious
and “Aaah” these doughnuts are ace.

And you hear them say, “I really shouldn’t”
or “Just a tiny bit, I’m on a diet.”

Really, it’s the only time they’re quiet
when they’re cramming cakes into their mouths,
when they’re wearing a creamy moustache
or the jam squirts out like blood,
or they’re licking chocolate
from their fingers.

You can tell when they’ve been scoffing,
they get lazy in literacy,
sleepy in silent reading,
nonsensical in numeracy,
look guilty in assembly.

But nothing gets teachers more excited
than cakes in the staffroom at break time,
unless of course,
it’s wine in the staffroom at lunchtime!

 

© 2005, Brian Moses

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

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Vegan eh?!

Crikey!  Since I was asked to start writing on this blog, I can truly say that I’ve been challenged by some of the themes.

Ok.  I am NOT a Vegan.   I do however admire anyone who is able to follow this lifestyle choice.   It takes real commitment!  Doing a little research, you realise just how little there really is in a Supermarket that they can eat.  The vast majority of our Food and other items these days contain ingredients that we may not realise are actually there, like gelatin to bind. It can be found in food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics.  It is derived from boiling various by-products of animals such as bones, tendons, ligaments and sometimes skin.   The Vegan alternative to gelatin is Agar Agar (derived from Seaweed apparently) just in case you needed to know.

 I found it quite fascinating how much I didn’t know about the food we eat.  I’ll always be a carnivore, but one perhaps that is a little more aware of what is in her food.

 Should anyone ever wish to invite me to a Vegan Dinner Party, I have had a mooch at some recipes and have found the following one to be the most appealing.  Simple tastes, but please omit the Courgette.  Can’t stand it, yuck!

 

Vegetarian casserole
By Caroline Hire

Cooking time

Prep: 10 mins Cook: 40 mins
Skill level
Easy
Servings
Serves 4

A Mediterranean one-pot stew with peppers, courgettes, lentils, sweet smoked paprika and thyme.

Flavour tip

This casserole is best if made the day before to allow the flavours to develop.

Ingredients

·         1 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil
·         1 onion, finely chopped
·         3 garlic cloves, sliced
·         1 tsp smoked paprika
·         ½ tsp cumin
·         1 tbsp dried thyme
·         3 medium carrots, sliced (about 200g)
·         2 medium sticks celery, finely sliced (about 120g)
·         1 red pepper, chopped
·         1 yellow pepper, chopped
·         2 x 400g tins tomatoes or peeled cherry tomatoes
·         250ml vegetable stock cube
·         2 courgettes, sliced thickly (about 300g)
·         2 sprigs fresh thyme
·         250g cooked lentils (we used Merchant Gourmet ready-to-eat Puy lentils)

Method

1.       Heat the oil in a large, heavy-based pan. Add the onions and cook gently for 5 – 10 mins until softened.
2.       Add the garlic, spices, dried thyme, carrots, celery and peppers and cook for 5 minutes.
3.       Add the tomatoes, stock, courgettes and fresh thyme and cook for 20 - 25 minutes.
4.       Take out the thyme sprigs. Stir in the lentils and bring back to a simmer. Serve with wild and white basmati rice, mash or quinoa.

 

That’ll do nicely, thanks.  Mmmmmmmmm. 

 

Disclaimer - If the above recipe should incorporate anything that is not suitable for Vegans, firstly I wholeheartedly apologise, and secondly it may be worth logging on to the bbcgoodfood.com site to complain.  That’s where I got it from as it was listed under their Vegan Category.

 

Thanks for reading. ;-)

 

 

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A Recipe for Sound

I would describe myself as a page poet. By this, I mean that my poems work better on the page than they do at a microphone. I am not a performance poet and, more importantly, I don’t aspire to be one. I’m instinctively shy and just convincing myself to stand in front of a room full of people is challenging, then asking me to read poetry is even more difficult. But I do it. I stand at the microphone and read my page poems. I do it because it’s always good to do something that frightens you – throws you outside of your comfort zone – and when you survive, it makes you realise that you can be stronger than your greatest fears.

I’m a page poet that likes sound. That cares as much about how my poetry sounds as the way it looks on the page. I don’t just look, but I listen as well. I read aloud as I’m writing, feeling the lines rolling off my tongue and changing anything that doesn’t ‘sound right’. However, regardless of how much I like sound, it needs to work in conjunction with the overall meaning. It can add strength and emphasis to a poem. But on its own it will never add the depth and the multitude of layers that I love within poetry.

I can use sound to give a poem a specific feeling. I can manipulate assonance or alliteration, not only to accentuate a line but, also, to impart harshness or softness. If I consider syllables – stressed and unstressed – and place them in a given order, then I can create rhythm. If I use a string of monosyllabic lexemes in short lines, then I can create the illusion of speed, haste, panic. Therefore, I would argue that sound is as important to poetry as a line break – although probably not as important as the connotative meaning of individual words.

Recently, my mind (usually in the early hours of the morning) has been thinking about a new analogy for poetry. Like a simile it can allow you to think about things in a different way, and this can often enable you discover something new, something that you hadn’t considered before...

Poetry is like cookery. You start off by following recipes, weighing everything out and following each step. Then once you’ve mastered the basics you begin to experiment: taking what you’ve learnt from the recipes and applying it to something new. You learn the rules before you start to break them.

Cookery is about balancing ingredients, while poetry is about balancing words – with all their meaning, sound and power. If you get the balance wrong, it creates something that is inedible. For instance, it doesn’t matter how much you love spices, with all their autumnal colours and vibrant scents, if they’re used without a degree of skill then you’ll create something that fails to function as a meal. The very same philosophy is applicable to sound. It doesn’t matter how much you love sound, if you don’t achieve the right balance with poetry’s other ingredients then ultimately the poem will fail to fulfil its full potential.

Poets should be aware of sound, should employ sound techniques, and should care about the overall sound of their poem. But, equally, sound should be used like a spice: with care and caution.

Thank you for reading,
Lar

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