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!

Hummingbird at home

A couple of weeks ago a friend gave me a copy of the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook and since then I have been looking for an excuse (and the time) to try out some of the recipes. Well the time hasn't really materialised but it being Mr W's birthday today provided the ideal opportunity for me to dust off my apron and whip up some cupcakes as a birthday treat for him last night.

I had prepared well, buying the right size eggs, full fat milk and taking the unsalted butter out of the fridge to soften prior to going to Brownies. However things started to unravel slightly as I was carefully measuring out the ingredients and realised that I was a bit short of cocoa powder. Not a lot I could do about that at 8.30pm on a Tuesday night with limited time to bake the cakes in secret before Stephen got back from running club and so I carried on regardless. After some gentle whisking the mixture was ready for transferring into the cupcake cases - I was a little surprised at how runny it was and there didn't seem to be enough to fill the cases to the specified level, but I refrained from panicking and instead put the tray in the oven. 20 minutes or so later they were done and didn't look too bad, even if I say so myself.

I then left the cakes to cool, persuaded Mr W on his return from running club that upstairs was way better than downstairs and that I definitely wasn't baking, before whipping up the frosting. Vanilla flavoured due to the aforementioned lack of cocoa powder! After five minutes of whisking the frosting as prescribed in the recipe my arms felt quite tired from holding the electric whisk in place (thank goodness I hadn't had to whisk manually!) but the results were worth it - obviously I had to have a little taste before putting it on the cakes, a girl wouldn't want to posion her hubby! A sprinkle of chocolate sprinkles and the cakes were finished - time for bed!

Fast forward to this morning and birthday tea in bed - add a candle to one of the cupcakes, locate matches to light said candle, a little bit of out-of-tune singing and you have one happy birthday boy!

Baking bagels

Mr W has been eating a lot of bagels lately as an extra snack to help get him through the day without ending up totally exhausted and so today I thought I'd see if I could surprise him with some homemade ones....

Well, when I say 'homemade' I actually mean 'homemade with a bit of help from the breadmaker', but the thought was there.

This was the first time that I had ventured beyond the recipes in our breadmaker's User Guide to those in a breadmaker recipe book given to me many moons ago by my godmother. She gave me the book when we mentioned that we were thinking of buying a breadmaker, it took us at least another 2 years to actually buy said breadmaker and its been another 2 years of owning the breadmaker until I've actually been brave enough to try something different!

Things started well - adding ingredients to the mixing bowl in a specified order and selecting the 'dough' option on the breadmaker. A couple of hours later and the dough was ready to be shaped into bagels and these left to prove for 20 minutes. But then came the tricky bit - cooking the bagels in sugary water prior to them going in the oven. As soon as I put the first three in the pan of boiling water the join split and rather than being round like a bagel they instead looked rather like uncooked croissants. Not being one to panic I fished them out of the pan, turned the heat down prior to putting the next batch in and gave the join an extra squeeze together before dropping them in the water. Happily these all stayed semi-round and I gave the ones that split a little help in looking more like a bagel by pinning them together with a cocktail stick. 15 minutes or so in the oven and out came 8 golden bagels - not as uniformly shaped as those from the supermarket, but a taste test later this afternoon showed them to be perfectly edible. Now just got to wait and see what the bagel connoisseur thinks!

Mum's cakes

Everyone's skills have to come from somewhere and I have to say that, although a lot of my cake-baking has been picked up along the way, the definite inspiration for my baking efforts is my Mum. And I was reminded this weekend that I definitely still have a long way to go.

When I was small (and probably even not so small) I can remember there always being cake in the house and in the last couple of years I have been trying to follow this example so that we always have some nice snack to take along to work and keep us going through the morning without having to resort to bought biscuits, snack bars, etc. filled with preservatives, E numbers and who knows what other nasties. However with only two of us in the house I am not a great offerer of choice, so imagine our excitement this weekend whilst visiting my parents to be offered a whole range of sweet treats to choose from to go with our cup of afternoon tea.

Mum had really surpassed herself and we may have even been offered four choices but my eyes had slightly glazed over and I was starting to salivate by the time she got to the Dundee Cake option after hearing about Coffee Sponge Cake and Mars Bar Rice Crispie cakes. 'Well, I shouldn't really as I'm going for a run in a bit' I virtuously proclaimed, 'well, maybe just something small for energy, perhaps a rice crispie cake...' But then out came the gloriously light (well that was my justification for eating it!) coffee cake with layers of butter icing in the middle and on top. Virtue went out of the window and soon I was happily tucking into the coffee cake with everyone else!

Incidentally I did go for my run eventually and I did get try to the Mars Bar Rice Crispie cake later in the weekend but somehow even with a long three day weekend I ran out of time to check out the Dundee Cake...