Secret cakes..

This has been a week for baking from the CCC (Clandestine Cake Club) cookbook. My fwend has baked the light stem ginger cake (twice), the magic bean cake (which may need less than three apples) and the sultana cake (which she was kind enough to share with us). A colleague made the elderflower cordial cake with white chocolate ganache, which she said was yummy (no samples left, so we have to take her word for it). I baked the cranberry and orange Madeira cake, a lovely plain cake which left a refreshing citrus tang in the mouth with no trace of guilt.
Of course I tweaked the recipe. No springform tin, so I parchment-lined two 16cm gold Prestige tins, with enough mixture to fill 2 mini cases(about the size of a muffin tin).
Don't like using a food processor for cake (it is so easy to over mix), so made it like my carrot cake, using a rotary whisk.
200ml is about the juice from 3 oranges.
For those with an Aga, I put them on the second shelf up (top oven) with solid tray above, for 15 minutes, turned tins round, removed solid tray and cooked for a further 10 - 15mins. Check with a skewer for doneness.

As with all baking, know your oven. The elderflower cordial cake was baked in a fan oven and came out a bit well-fired.
Next week I plan to try the Empire cake with cardamon buttercream. Still having no springform tin, I think it may work as a tray bake. I was going to do the Japanese green tea + orange cake (such a pretty green colour) but having investigated to cost of matcha (how much?!) will leave that until the numbers come up!

I felt I had to include a photo of the fancies - I make them so rarely, I forget the decorations - so this is a memo to self.
(P.S. The beige blob with a squiggle of chocolate (middle top) is the trendy roasted white chocolate which seems to be everywhere....)  

Fragile

Words are devious, I'm sure you have noticed. They start life as a means to communicate, simple and straight forward. Then, like a game, were are introduced to those that look similar but sound different (dough, chough, cough, bough) and those that sound the same but look dissimilar (stare, stair, stir or pour, paw but not poor - no one said English was easy). So we learn to read and suddenly those squiggles on the page acquire the power to draw pictures in our imagination. A magic world, just for us and so we read and read and slowly we come to realise the subtlety of the words themselves.
Take fragile. Can't you just hear the tinkling fracture of destruction? For inanimate objects it usually means break, destroy, end, but for the animate it can be a bit more complicated. It can refer to a physical, emotional or psychological state. It may not be an end in itself but an ongoing process for which the result is uncertain. Flowers are fragile as they fade and die, but a person in a fragile state may be in a dark place from which they would return.

And then there are fossils, what was once animals, plants, footsteps in the sand, now fixed in stone.
Stone, fragile? And yet along the coast where these fossils are found, erosion from the sea and weather is slowly wearing them down, washing them away.

So perhaps fragile is just a way to describe a state of flux - like glass; looks like one thing (a solid) but is another (a liquid). Sounds a bit like Life, hmm?

Castaway companions

For some, Sunday just would not be the same without tales of country folk and eight esoteric pieces of music. I wondered what it would be like to choose books rather than tunes, what criteria one would use. Upon reflection, this one has decided on books I remember reading, their effect on me and why I remember them. The order is chronological (for no particular reason) and there seems to be more from recent years. Perhaps time filters choice...
1. Green Darkness by Anya Seton. A historical novel which introduced me to the idea of reincarnation.
2. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. A grown-up read whilst I was in a children's ward recovering from an operation.
3. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. Recommended to make me think. I loved the way the story puled the reader in one direction then pushed you off balance by going somewhere else entirely.
4. Jumping the Queue by Mary Wesley. Written by an older woman, discussing suicide in a gentile way. A revelation.
5. Landscape of Lies by Peter Watson. A treasure hunt based around a painting (a copy of which is included in the frontispiece). Fun
6. Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The hero takes a backseat as her friend/husband gets all the action and she copes and waits...
7. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Grabs your attention by being gentle and unpredictable.
8. Selected works by T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. What a joy, with its intricate sketches in the margins! I really must replace my copy, which I gave to a friend.
9. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I meant to keep the list to eight, but this was so good. I was bereft when I reached the last page and found myself turning back to the beginning to re-read Anticipation.
Instead of Shakespeare, could I have the complete works of Terry Pratchett? And a cooking bible (please don't ask me to choose one - just one?!)
My luxury would have to be a waterproof, solar powered e-reader, on to which the books would be down-loaded. It would of course need a safe pouch for my glasses and a strap from which to hang around my neck as I swim from my sinking ship to the desert island......

   

Oops!

Apologies to those who care..... Re last post, the pencil museum is in Keswick, not Kendal. So sorry.
Kendal is the home of a very nice indie coffee shop with interesting light bites and amusingly tall chairs...

Idle facts...

Did you know there were plumbago mines in the Lake district? I didn't. Apparently it was used in the casting of cannon balls, to make them smooth and fly true. After cannon fire went out of fashion, a new use had to be found. Pencils, (Kendal museum of...).
Ah, graphite!
And here was me thinking plumbago was a fragrant, exotic plant!
(Or perhaps a milky pudding....)

Gray area

Last week I met a person who wanted to learn the secret meaning of dreams; not sure I go along with this, after waking suddenly, darkly. For some well argued reason, I was allowing someone to divide my head with an axe. No fear, just impatience, just get on with it!
It was very windy, a restless night. There are disturbed dreams. And then there is just plain disturbed.

Deer, dear?

From time to time, I like to stand in the garden and take stock, check the flora and fauna. See what is flowering, inspect the pond for wildlife and see how many different types of bee there are. This week we are away and our 'garden' is several acres of landscape and woodland. As the seasons are all to pot, I thought it would be interesting to take notes on our sunny walk around the wooded area, over the river. Almost immediately we realised it was an abandoned garden, with lumps of mossily-overgrown worked stone and random, hidden ponds making walking difficult. Snowdrops were everywhere, sprinkled with blue muscari, yellow primroses and one or two Corsican hellebore. Daffodils just beginning to open while ransoms were only a green ground cover with barely a hint of garlic. Trees that should be bright green had few buds, branches dark and bare as if it were still mid-winter. Some beetles and ants were at work in the leaf litter - eyes were to the ground to avoid stumbling in the mud and debris. Also signs of conkers, hazelnuts and beech mast from autumn. Fir cones, some nibbled, indicating the occasional visiting squirrel. Then a clearing, sun slipping through the canopy, rustling in the undergrowth. Deer? (Small, so could only be munkjac) or rabbits? A bit further on we surprised a cock pheasant and then the hen ran out from a tree stump - do pheasants nest on the ground? After that we lost the path and slipped over some muddy ground, grasping at the many sprouting rhododendrons with their tightly packed buds. Staggering up a sandy bank (lots of holes, so I think what we saw were bunnies), we eventually found the path again. Apart from wood pigeon, no more wildlife. Spring not quite here yet.
P.S. That was yesterday - today it snowed!