Retro puds

Ashamed as I am to admit it I'm quite a fan of retro food - one of my favourite starter choices is prawn cocktail, so when I spotted a cherry cheesecake recipe in the 'retro rapido' section of my Nigella Express cookbook I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately though Nigella was quite adamant that you shouldn't use cherry pie filling - this was quite a surprise given some of the other ingredients she's not ashamed to use - and as I couldn't find the alternative she suggested, a pure fruit conserve - the shops had every other flavour but cherry - I decided to scrap that idea and use my gran's recipe instead.

This is a recipe that I've had stuck in my recipe book for a while but have never quite got round to making, so what better time than to make it for the first time when you have guests for lunch?! Fortunately it was all quite simple, even though it had to be baked in the oven a couple of times and after the second time I had to give my Mum a quick call to see how set it was supposed to be at this stage as it seemed quite wobbly. One advantage of family recipes is that you can do this! It clearly tasted ok too as six of us managed to pretty much demolish a pud that I have been since told should serve about 10 people in one sitting!

Rock and pop

I've had a bit of a busy day yesterday - geocaching, gym, haircut and then going out to our triathlon club annual dinner in the evening, but knowing that we might not eat until quite late I wanted to have some cake in the house so that we could have a cup of tea and piece of cake late afternoon to keep us going. A Victoria sponge would have been nice, but didn't think I'd have time for that. Second choice was scones but we don't have any strawberry jam in the house and much as I tried I couldn't get my head around scones with any other flavour jam. No cream would be just about ok, but plum or cherry jam on scones would just be odd, same as I'd only ever countenance using raspberry jam in a Victoria sponge. Yes, I am quite possibly mad...

Cupcakes are my usual fail-safe when I want something quick but I wanted something different and so I opted for rock cakes - crumbly mounds of cake filled with a generous handful of dried fruit and topped with a sprinkling of crunchy sugar. Made in the half an hour or so that I had spare between lunch and showering before my haircut whilst bopping round the kitchen to a generous portion of the sort of cheesy pop that I'm only allowed to listen to whilst Mr W is out. My perfect afternoon!

Here is a pre- and post- oven shot of the cakes...

As a footnote, I am still reeling in astoundment at the comment from the lady baker on 'Turn Back Time - The High Street' that she didn't like making cakes - I don't understand, what is there not to like about the joy of producing something so yummy to eat?

Is it really baking?

I think I may be a baking snob...I haven't posted on this blog for ages but this advert in today's paper inspired me and it wasn't in a good way!

It's an advert for a Delia Christmas cake in a packet where all of the ingredients are measured out for you and you just have to combine them and cook it, which to me that is just wrong on so many levels...

Firstly it's rather cheating - I mean part of the skill of making a cake is getting the measurements correct. I guess you could argue that it's convenient if you don't usually bake cakes and don't want to specially buy lots of fancy ingredients. But if I'm honest, are cake ingredients really that fancy? I mean surely things like flour, sugar, butter and eggs are a standard store-cupboard ingredient? True you may not already have dried fruit but a Christmas cake uses a lot of it anyway and the leftovers can always be used to make more cakes or as a healthy snack. As for the spices, yes you only use a little bit in the cake but again they keep for ages and can be used to add a bit of zing to a crumble topping or in more cakes. So I reckon that claiming you don't want to waste ingredients is a somewhat lame excuse for being too lazy to measure it out yourself.

There's also the argument that it would be quicker, but I assume all the bits are individually packaged so by the time you've opened all of those you could probably have measured everything yourself anyway. The real time-saver would be a pre-lined cake tin to bake it in! And of course there is all the additional packaging that this must entail...

Finally the price - the pack costs a tenner and although I'm very anti- buying ready-made cakes, to be honest for that amount of money I'd want a finished cake not a bake-your-own job. Plus I wonder whether the pack includes all the perishable ingredients like eggs and butter, and what about the marizpan and icing, are they included or is there another pack for that?

Yes, whilst the advert is all glossy and sounds good, I think I will be sticking the more traditional method of bake-your-own cakes, although this year we're having Christmas at my parents and my godmother is bringing the cake so there'll be no cake-baking at all for me.

In a jam

I do like homemade jam, if only there wasn't so much stirring involved...

Whilst in town on Saturday afternoon I spotted strawberries on sale for a pound a punnet and on a whim decided to buy some to make jam. In an effort to ensure that the jam would set I bought jam sugar with pectin added and followed the recipe on the back of the packet to the letter, well more or less. I may have skimped slightly on the continually stirring that was requested but amazingly it all worked out okay and I ended up with four and a half jars of yummy strawberry jam. It even set without me having to faff about putting saucers in the freezer in order to test it. I still can't the fruit to be evenly distributed through the jar though - maybe that's down to lack to stirring!

Never mind the jam still tastes good on bagels, toast, scones with clotted cream...

Types of baking

I have recently discovered that I adopt different styles of baking dependent on circumstance and my mood. I've already blogged about "replacement baking" when I used baking as an excuse not to run in the rain and then the other weekend I started off with "preparedness baking", followed by "emergency baking" when the prepared cakes got used for an alternative purpose.

The story went as follows: it was Mother's Day weekend and I'd invited my in-laws for Sunday lunch, but thinking they were likely to stay for some tea in the afternoon I decided to be organised and make some cake on Friday evening. I opted for orange fairy cakes, a nice simple recipe - first time I'd made it with orange although I've made it using lemon in the past - and once I'd finished icing them and topped them off with little sugar flowers, they looked most appropriate for a Mother's Day tea I thought!

But then Saturday morning came and we had a phone call from our friends and their three children saying they were in the area and so perhaps they could pop in to say 'hello'. Always lovely to catch-up with friends, but not so good on the organised cake front since these are the friends from where the name 'zoecakes' originated and so it would have been very poor form not to share my latest creations with them. There was no time for baking pre-visit since we had gym plans (the cakes don't work themselves off you know!) and so the MD cakes were brought out. Happily they went down very well, but then the rest of my afternoon was spent in "emergency baking" mode - I opted to make Rock Cakes for a change, as it seemed a little dull to be making the same cakes twice in as many days, not to mention the fact that I didn't have any more oranges. Can't really go wrong with Rock Cakes and so my good daughter-in-law halo remained intact by the end of Sunday afternoon, other than of course the geocaching scuffles with my father-in-law after lunch, but that's a whole other story...

Foreign food

This weekend Mr Bad Wabbit and I are going to Barcelona - Mr Wabbit will be running his seventh marathon, as mentioned once or twice in his recent blog postings, and I will be sampling some Spanish hospitality, oops sorry I mean cheering him from the sidelines. Actually I will be doing both and I am understandably quite excited about the prospect - always nice to be able to see your hubby achieving his goals and I do enjoy eating!

Whilst Spain is not exactly renowned for it cakes, à la this blog, I'd probably need to go to a French patisserie for that, I am rather fond of tapas and sangria. It's tricky to pick a favourite dish, although chorizo in red wine is always a winner in the Wabbit household and for me spanish omelette evokes memories of when I worked in Spain several years ago. Based in an office full of Spaniards I'd made an English friend when out for a walk one evening as I'd spotted his English newspaper and wanted to know where I could get one for myself - I never did buy my own paper in the end as he generously offered to give me his once he'd finished it. So we established a habit of meeting after work for him to pass on his paper and to share a beer in a local cafe which was always served with a pincho of tortilla de patatas. Since then I have often tried to make Spanish omelette, but I've never managed to make it as light and fluffy as the ones I had then.

The different food tastes around the world never fail to amaze me - on a work trip to Houston last year we were taken to a restaurant that specialized in chicken-fried steak! It did also serve the more well-knowned option of fried chicken, but I thought 'when in Rome' and opted for the steak... I wouldn't want to criticise other people's choice of food but for me it was just bizarre and seemed to be a waste of a good piece of steak, so it won't be gaining a place on my top ten list of favourite foods. And even worse I was so full after all the batter on my steak, that I had no room for pudding!

Replacement baking

I was supposed to be going for a run this morning but it got cancelled due to rain and so I baked instead. I did feel rather guilty about replacing a healthy activity with an activity that created something rather less healthy, but then I looked on Facebook and saw that I wasn't the only runner who'd turned to baking as a replacement for running. It seems that we were all cooking up treats rather than pounding the streets in the rain...

This morning I opted to make a nice easy carrot cake - as described in "Too many cookbooks spoil the broth", although fortunately I had no problems finding the recipe this morning as I've been thinking about making carrot cake for at least the last week and so the recipe has been sitting on my recipe stand in the kitchen since then. I was also on my second set of carrots bought for the recipe as the first lot got eaten for dinner last weekend. It was nice to get back in the kitchen to make a sweet treat, as recently I've only had time for cooking dinner and no time for cakes. Similarly I haven't had any time for blogging either, although I confess that the blogging has suffered more than the cake-making - I do after all have a husband to feed and cakes generally win over words!