Bring me sunshine

I like to think that I’m a realist. I know that my less than imposing height (and several other factors) means that I will not forge a successful modelling career. I know that knowing all the words to Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat doesn’t make me cool. And I know that people will always ask me whether having a Theology degree means I’m going to be a nun. So having lived in England all my life I know that it is going to rain for a significant portion of the year. Nevertheless, waking up last week to see driving rain falling horizontally past my window still made my heart sink. It’s July! The month of barbecues, the irresponsible consumption of Pimm’s and lolling around in temperatures which, if not blazing, are warm enough to warrant the removal of a jumper.

So, ensconced in my flat, clutching a mug of tea defensively, I decided to counteract the rain in the only way I know how- by baking something. Something which would remind me that yes, this is actually summer and provide some kind of comfort in the face of soggy adversity. And also something which didn’t require me to go to the shops for ingredients. A quick perusal of my cupboards and fridge led me to only one conclusion- lemon drizzle cake.

This is one of  my favourite cakes- at my 21st birthday which saw all the tables named after cake varieties, mine was lemon drizzle. It’s sticky, sweet, but never cloying or sickly thanks to the lift which the lemons provide. I generally always have lemons in the fruit bowl as they’re a welcome addition to many baked goods- and the odd gin and tonic too. And as soon as I began to zest the fruit, I knew I’d made the right decision. The fresh, sharp aroma immediately lifted my spirits and transported me to a sunnier, happier place than grey, wet south London. And made me rather want a gin and tonic…given that it was 11 in the morning, I had to fight this particular urge.

Strawberries and cream

Wimbledon!

…has been and gone. Typically, I am somewhat behind the curve and writing about something which is old news. Although, given that this blog isn’t one dedicated to tennis or even sport, I hope you’ll forgive me and instead focus on the fact that I’m showing you something delicious which has something of a relevance in terms of current affairs. Strawberries and cream, that essential Wimbledon delicacy, in cupcake form.

My relationship with tennis hasn’t always been a particularly happy one. In fact, my enjoyment of the sport rose markedly once I stopped playing it. As a child I did the usual Saturday morning and after-school tennis classes, briefly enjoying the glittering accolade of ‘Most Improved’ player in my beginners’ class (I still have the shield). One year my birthday cake was the shape of a tennis racquet, coinciding with my receiving one as a gift (a black and gold Slazenger one, with a picture of Tim Henman on the packaging).  However, being the chubby, bookish child that I was, this soon slowed to a halt and the tennis racquet began to gather dust.

At secondary school I had to face the brutal reality of compulsory tennis lessons during the summer term, which saw me consistently in the bottom group, cursing the unsympathetic teachers as I struggled to sprint from the baseline to the net during warm-ups, and failed to even hit the ball during games with alarming regularity.

Needless to say, my opinion of the sport in general was somewhat tainted by my experiences. But the realisation that this was a sport which could be watched and enjoyed, rather than played (in the loosest sense of the word in my case) and endured began to dawn once I no longer had to undertake the weekly embarassment of Group C tennis. I wouldn’t identify myself as a tennis fan – I know who some of the big names are, how the scoring works, and can smile and nod along to a conversation on the subject – but Wimbledon converts me for two weeks a year. This, I suppose, is mostly down to the atmosphere and traditions of the event itself; the dedicated fans huddled resolutely on ‘Murray Mountain’ come [usually] rain or shine, the stipulation that players’ kit must be predominantly white, the defiant optimism that one day, one day, a Brit will win, and of course the strawberries and cream.

Go long

Sometimes it pays to play a slightly longer game. Too often the temptation for many people – myself included – is to go for the instant gratification, for what works right now, with little regard for how things are going to pan out further down the line. Of course, the flipside of this is being overly cautious, waiting and seeing for just that little bit too long, and ultimately going nowhere; generally something which you only realise in retrospect, or as you see that opportunity passing you by, kicking up a dust of ‘what if’s and ‘if only’s. And then, inevitably, there’s the question as to how to make a call between waiting it out and seizing the opportunity when it presents itself. As far as I know – and I’m very willing to be corrected on this one – this is only something learned with experience, through making both mistakes and welcome discoveries.

This is something which I ended up musing on as I undertook a task which could be used as an example of the benefits of taking time over things and knowing that this will improve the end result. Or at least it could if your mind works in a similar way to mine – a rather big and probably implausible ask.

I was shelling pistachios.

Definitely not something to be entered into if you’re looking for instant gratification. There are shells which need to be pried open, including ones which haven’t quite split enough, leaving you with that dilemma of working at them and risking pistachios springing out suddenly and ending up halfway across the kitchen, or conceding defeat and discarding a perfectly useful and tasty nut. Oh, it’s a hard life.

I could have bought them pre-shelled, but the principle of paying extra for something which I could achieve for free just sat wrong with me. And besides, I had the time. It was a Sunday, the kitchen was entirely mine, and Lucinda Williams was playing on my iPod. I did persevere, and along with chipping my recently applied (and in hindsight, ill-advised) nail varnish, I was rewarded with the perfect complement to the white chocolate chips which were to be added to my cookies.

Put a lid on it

I recently had a spate of activity in which I did a lot of those stupid jobs which you know you need to do, and you know will take up a negligible amount of your time but somehow you never actually, well, do. Apologies for the amount of italics in that last sentence…I often think in italics, which I don’t think is a normal thing to do. It’s not, is it? Hmm.

But anyway, I was on a roll. I deleted a load of duplicate songs off my iPod which was both satisfying and disturbing as in the process discovered that I have a disproportionate amount of Elton John on there. I know, Elton John. I was as confused and upset as you, not least because his songs outnumbered ones by Pink Floyd fairly comfortably. In addition to being brutally confronted with my questionable taste in music, I also registered with the local doctor’s surgery (despite having lived in this area for over 6 months) and cleared out a lot of old magazines from my room. I was definitely on a roll, and, spurred on by this burst of productivity, I decided to do something else which I’d been meaning to get round to- baking something to take into work.

I’d been mulling over taking some kind of baked good in for a while, but had always stopped short due to the fact that my office has a culture of certain people bringing in baking and as an intern I didn’t want to step on anyone’se toes by bouncing in in my second week with a tin brimming with tasty treats. What if one of the established bakers took offence? What if I managed to get myself embroiled in some kind of confectionary war of attrition? Or, on the other hand, what if they didn’t like what I’d made? Of course, these scenarios are melodramatic, unlikely and really quite silly, but these elements of my personality have a habit of coming out when I’m engaged in things involving butter, sugar and eggs. Please don’t ask why (to be honest I’m a little scared to find out).

Two months down the line, however, I was riding a wave of small achievements and decided that it was time to roll up my sleeves, preheat the oven, and make some cookies.

10:50

The other weekend I went to a school reunion; the occasion marked the upcoming departure of the principal, and everyone who attended the school from 1997 to 2010 (the duration of her reign tenure) was invited to go. Given that I hadn’t left all that long ago and that I live near the town which the school is in, returning probably didn’t evoke the same dormant feelings of nostalgia which it did for others for whom this could well have been the first time they set foot in the building since leaving 15 years ago. I’m also not one to go in for rose-tinted retrospectives of the time I spent at school, which I would struggle to define as the best days of my life, and prefer to leave a substantial amount of my memories safely in the past.

Some memories did present themselves, though. Once I had registered and received my name badge – which actually proved to be a useful tool for old teachers and acquaintances to identify me, thanks to a new haircut, improved dress sense and the loss of a fairly significant amount of weight – I stood chatting to friends, clutching a cup of coffee, in the same room where break time food used to be served for the sixth formers.

Yes, I went to a school where you got food at break time. Free food. Every day, at 10:50, we would descend on this room (called the Garden Common Room, or GCR) to receive some form of sustenance. Wednesdays were often a favoured day, due to the presence of buns, often of the Chelsea variety. Yes, I went to a school where you got Chelsea buns at break time. And thanks to the regularity of break times, I often found myself instinctively wanting food (as opposed to feeling hungry) at 10:50 even once I’d left. I chose to ignore this, rather than merrily suggesting an iced bun mid-morning, when I started at university.

So, although my general pattern of behaviour is to repress inclinations to indulge in fond (or not) memories of school days, sometimes making the foodstuff which was essential to the experience is the best way to remember them.

Beat it.

I had an unexpected bit of fun whilst I was baking this week – not that being in the kitchen messing around with butter, sugar and flour isn’t already fun, obviously. But an intially irritating moment ended up reminding me about the enjoyment very simple things can bring.

I’d been planning the cookies for most of the day at work, as you do. I knew I had the ingredients, I knew I had the time to chill the dough for long enough before baking it. It was so on. Once I was back home I merrily weighed out my butter, sugar and spices, placed them in my mixing bowl and prepared to inflict some serious hand-mixer action on them.

Or not.

I can only assume the fuse in the plug has gone, because despite my best efforts (unplugging it then plugging it back in…and maybe a few verbal threats) the bloody thing wouldn’t go. It didn’t even make that noise that electrical appliances make when they’re trying to work, they really want to, but it’s just so hard. Nope. My mixer was, for want of a better word, buggered.

Which really left me with no option but to beat the stuff together myself; the other option was separating butter, two kinds of sugar and various ground spices and returning them to their respective packaging. I’m obsessive, but even I draw the line somewhere. Thankfully I’d softened the butter beforehand, so was only slightly out of breath by the time I’d produced a butter-sugar combination which was to my satisfaction.

Thank goodness I hadn’t been planning to make meringues.

[Insert Egg Pun Here]

There were just too many lame jokes I could make, so it was probably best to restrain myself entirely and make none. Use your imagination and picture the funniest, wittiest pun you can imagine. That’s the one I would have used.

But far more important than my lame sense of humour: Happy Easter! The period of Lenten abstinence is over and all over the world people can eat chocolate, drink alcohol, or if you’re me diet coke (given the amount that I normally consume, this has been a trying time). But not only this, the tomb is empty and Jesus has risen. Hence the presence of eggs, which symbolise the new life and birth associated with this festival.

When my sister and I were given Easter eggs as children, more often than not a tacit war would develop to see who could make theirs last the longest. Quite what we thought this would achieve I’m not entirely sure, as it usually resulted in large amounts of either melted or stale chocolate sitting in our rooms which would get thrown away or eaten in one sitting after a warning from our mother. And eating chocolate in May when it’s starting to get that white-ish bloom on it just isn’t quite the celebratory experience that you get from unwrapping the foil on Easter morning and breaking off the first piece (or alternatively keeping the foil on and dropping the egg from a great height in order to fragment it in a highly satisfactory manner).

I’ve never made my own Easter eggs, but these biscuits (taken from Popina’s Book of Baking) are an intermediate step as they consist of chocolate dough formed into egg shapes. Not perfect egg shapes, but I think they’re a close enough approximation. The recipe in Popina says to use an egg-shaped cutter which I don’t possess, and didn’t actually know existed. So I improvised- a childhood of watching Blue Peter has got to be good for something, right? So I give you my high-tech egg-forming solution:

Mad craft skills.

Buns in the oven

Easter baking has a tendency to smell like Christmas baking. I discovered this as I was mixing dried fruit and mixed spice into flour and sugar the other night…and even that sentence could have been written in the run-up to Christmas. It got me wondering (I do it a lot) about what it is about the two holidays which causes much of the baked goods associated with them to combine a heady mix of spices, mixed peel and dried fruit. Christmas, in a way, makes more sense as it’s a winter festival which occurs when there isn’t an abundance of fresh fruit around. But Easter? I know it’s occurred late this year, but there are various fruits coming into season in the spring which, on the surface, would make more sense to use for celebratory baking. That said, there is a  reason for the presence of the currants/raisins in hot cross buns; I was always taught that they represented the nails which held Jesus to the cross. But the fact that they’re combined with very similar ingredients to those found in Christmas cake, mince meat et al must have some greater significance.

So maybe it’s not an issue of practicality. Maybe it’s more to do with the fact that both festivals – whether you believe in them or not – are celebrating something fundamentally special. At Christmas, Jesus is born, marking the beginning of a time in human history unlike any other. And at Easter, this extraordinary time comes to a climax with his arrest, trial, death and eventual resurrection. And both of these, for Christians, call for some serious partying. And maybe using this particular combination of ingredients was the best way to pull out all the stops and do just that.

My attempts to find some answers from the internet fell a little flat (which may have been to do with the somewhat obscure search terms I used) so I can’t offer any substantiation for my claims. Anyone who is better-informed than I am – and let’s face it, people like that aren’t in short supply – please feel free to illuminate the issue further.

What I do know, though, is that it simply wouldn’t be Easter without hot cross buns.

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to

I probably should start by saying that this title is almost entirely misleading. You can expect a story about a party, but it wasn’t mine and I didn’t cry. In fact, no-one cried, which is pretty much how we were intending the party to go. I did have a bit of a strop though, about something related to the party which I am now about to write about. But that would have been a pretty crap title.

First, by way of context, it was my lovely mother’s 50th birthday last Friday. We celebrated the only way our family knows how, namely by getting together and eating rather a lot of food and probably drinking far too much [very nice] wine. Several months ago, I had very enthusiastically offered to make the birthday cake for these proceedings, back in the heady days when I didn’t have a job and was unable to think far enough into the future to envisage actually having one. But, lo and behold, I’ve been doing a pretty good impersonation of an adult recently and am sort-of-gainfully employed. But anyway, the cake was my responsibility – and my favourite distraction in that dead time between 3pm and half past 5 in the afternoon when lunch was a lifetime ago and home-time isn’t quite tangible yet.

I settled on a strawberry chiffon shortcake, taking inspiration from Smitten Kitchen.

British strawberries are in season, so what better way to celebrate this by bunging a load in and on top of a cake, accompanied by lashings of white chocolate and cream?

But what could I possibly have to strop about? What, in that combination of cake, strawberries and cream could have irked me?

The bloody sponge.

Chiffon cake involves beating egg whites with cream of tartar and a bit of sugar as you would for making a meringue, before folding this into the batter. The end result is a wonderfully light and fluffy texture which perfectly counterbalances the heavy dairy (and fat) contribution of the cream and doesn’t overcrowd the sweetness of the strawberries. At least, that’s the end result if you beat the whites for long enough. I had a fit of paranoia that I was going to overbeat them and stopped about 30 seconds before I should have. The result was two sponges with less than endearing sunken tops, and a rather grumpy yours truly. What can I say? I have a tendency to be slightly highly-strung at the best of times, and the [self-imposed] pressure of producing the Best Cake in the World got to me. But just a little bit though.

Thankfully, the sponges were salvageable, as they hadn’t sunk to the extent that they were stodgy messes in the pan, and the cream did an ideal job of covering their flaws. Which is just as well, because I had made the rather inadvisable decision to make them the night before. Life on the edge, man. Seriously.

Get Shortbread

I have a habit of accumulating things. I don’t like throwing things away, and equally enjoy the memories associated with the rather eclectic things I’ve collected. My chest-of-drawers at home is a timeline of [often highly esoteric] moments in my life, like the enthusiastic beginnings of a collection of precious stones (some agate, a bit of amethyst and one of those bits of quartz that you buy in gift shops at stately homes) or the dark purple nail varnish which I habitually wore whilst pretending/wishing that I was Avril Lavigne. The less said about that the better, I think.

My baking cupboard tends to go a similar way. Ground almonds are the marzipan I made at Christmas, sunflower seeds are my attempts at making healthy energy bars (which, let’s face it, became flapjacks), and rose water…actually, I’m not sure why I did buy that.

Every so often, inevitably to make room for more ingredients, a clean-out is required. Last week I found my eye drawn to an almost-empty box of cocoa powder and a dwindling supply of hazlenuts. This, combined with quite a lot of butter in the fridge and an absence of eggs, could only mean one thing. Chocolate hazlenut shortbread.