It being Mothering Sunday we had invited my mother-in-law,
Barbara, around for tea; my own mum apparently spending most of the day
travelling across South East England on various forms of public transport.
Visitors are always an excuse for something yummy. Matt, my
husband, had declared (after a week of attempting to fix skirting board in our
front room) that this occasion would require him to spend most of the day in
the kitchen. I did not argue. I think the alternative would have been another
trip to the DIY store to acquire another tool. Probably a noisy tool. Matt’s
special is pizza and he wanted to do some sort choclately thing for afterwards.
I chose to lurk around in my pyjamas. I made considerable
progress in knitting three French hens, as well as some superglue and second
hand crockery based craft.
After lunch (yesterday’s stuffed cabbage leftovers), and with
this evening’s potentially extravagant tea in mind I decided that I really
ought to get dressed and get myself to the pool. Thus far Matt had looked through
some recipes but not made any decision on what he would like to bake for his
mum. And as I was about to leave he put on his best “pretty angel face” and
asked if I would mind making the cake. Which of course I wouldn’t as I love
baking!
I narrowed down my options to a choclately ginger thing or a
chocolately berry thing. The chocolate was in aid of Mothering Sunday,
otherwise the cake would have featured marmalade since I have more than 3kg
taking up valuable space in our store cupboard. I pondered over the choice
whilst swimming (another good session but the superglue didn’t come off my hand
despite an hour of chlorine treatment) but the decision was made for me as
there were no appropriate berries available. So ginger it would be.
The recipe I chose was a rich chocolate and ginger beer cake.
This was high risk from the start because it featured icing. I am not good at
icing so tend to opt for cakes with interesting things in them rather than on
them. But I am never going to get better at icing if I always avoid it. And
Barbara likes it so it seemed like the right thing to do.
After deciding what type of ginger beer to use (there were at
least 5 different varieties in the drinks cupboard), the cake mix itself was
fairly straightforward, using one more bowl than I would prefer as I had to
melt the chocolate into the ginger beer before adding to the flour, sugar, eggs
and butter (although I did substitute with some branded buttery spread).
I have recently discovered the significant advantages of
lining cake tins. I am yet to figure out if there is a right side and wrong
side of the baking paper. So today I conducted a simple experiment and put it
one way round in the first cake tin and the other way round in the second. I
can share with you my conclusion that for the baking of chocolate ginger beer
cake it makes no difference what way round you put the baking paper. It is not
yet clear whether this conclusion can be extrapolated to other types of cake
but I am looking forward to finding out.
And while the cake was in the oven I set to on the icing. The
recipe required mascarpone and since Matt had to pop up to the shop to get mozzarella
for the pizza I asked him to pick some up. He came back without mascarpone (not
stocked) but they did have a good offer on loo roll. So I was going to have to
improvise. So into my bowl went a tub of low fat soft cheese and some icing
sugar. And then I heard “ooh, that was nice that ginger beer”: Matt had just
enjoyed the 30ml or so that I had reserved for the icing. I was not keen on
opening another bottle just for this so instead added a glug of the syrup from
the preserved ginger in the fridge and whisked the whole lot up. And it was
very runny. This is one of the problems that I frequently encounter with icing.
Unsure of the appropriate remedial action (it tasted quite
nice so even if I had had some more icing sugar (which I didn’t) I wouldn’t
have really wanted to add any more for fear of making it too sweet) I phoned my
mum who is an essential source of cookery salvage tips. I first discovered this
when I was at university and making an apple cake. I was sufficiently knowledgeable
to realise that something wasn’t quite right before I put the mixture in the
oven but insufficiently experienced to have any clue what had gone wrong. Mum
managed to deduce that I had failed to use any eggs, which I duly mixed in and
cake disaster was averted. Today she warned me off adding double cream (I
thought it might whisk it up a bit more) but suggested I try adding in a bit of
“marg” or blitz up some caster sugar in the food processor to turn it into
something resembling icing sugar if I did want to go down that route. Not
wanting to make any more washing up I opted for the “marg” option and added a
lump of branded buttery before giving it all another whisk up. This actually did
thicken it up a bit and it still tasted quite nice. I decided for good measure
to add some glace ginger and then left it in the naïve hope that it would set a
bit more before the time came to ice the cake (which by now had been removed
from the oven and smelt amazing).
We all tucked into Matt’s delicious pizza and then I ventured
back to the kitchen to assemble the cake. The icing was still way too runny but
I could just about use it to sandwich the two layers together and cover the top
and sides. The sides of the cake that is, as well as the sides of the kitchen. I
had vastly overestimated the amount of icing that would be required but Barbara
very generously suggested that it could be used as a sauce.
This was an occasion for the musical cake slice. To which
Matt improvised some Mothering Sunday themed lyrics to the tune of For He’s a
Jolly Good Fellow.
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