Cake and Books

I was meant to go to London today to meet up with the delightful Betty.  Sadly her water pipes exploded (this is not a euphemism) and instead of meeting me for tea and buns at St. Pancras she had to sit at home in a puddle, waiting for Dynorod.

I could have gone to London anyway. I had a ticket for the train.  But I am still feeling ill, and the thought of spending the whole day alone in London just did not appeal.  Yes. That is how ill I am feeling. Tragic, non? Normally I would jump at the chance of spending a whole day in London.  I want to go to The Courtauld Gallery.  I want to see the new exhibition at The British Library.   I want to go to the John Soames Museum.  And that’s just the first three things I can think of. There are hundreds more.

But today it was cold, and windy, and rainy, and my chest hurt and I had no enthusiasm for anything at all.

I took myself home, shelved all thoughts of London into the ‘later’ category in my brain, and spent the day in the warm, snoozing, and reading, and watching television and cooking.

I am reading ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ by Salman Rushdie.  It is fabulous.

One of UE’s favourite ever books is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. When we first got together we had six months of trading books with each other and watching each other’s favourite films and listening to each other’s favourite music. It was fascinating.  I loved a lot of the music. I enjoyed a heap of the films. I hardly liked any of the books he held dear; particularly Midnight’s Children, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Slaughterhouse Five.

A few months after this, I was very ill, and UE came over one evening to look after me when I was laid up.  We were still love’s young dream then.  He came bearing treats and a book to read to me.  It was Haroun and The Sea of Stories, also by Rushdie.

I was alarmed.  I was prepared to hate it.  I was petulant.

It was wonderful.  It was everything that I had thought Midnight’s Children would be and then wasn’t.

If you’re ever thinking of reading Rushdie, I recommend starting with it.  It is an absolute delight of a book.  Luka and the Fire of Life is the sequel to Haroun.  Haroun was written for Rushdie’s eldest son when he was twelve.  Luka was written for his second son when he also turned twelve.  I would love to be given such a gift should I ever have the honour of turning twelve again.

I don’t really want to explain the plot too much.  I will say that it is a brilliant, funny, adventure story with bags of charm and character, and although it is written for a child, it is not childish at all, as with all of the best children’s books.  It is a privilege to read it.

I spent the afternoon baking.  We had run out of cake, which was not allowed.  I remember that when I was a child my mum would spend one afternoon a week baking for us.  We didn’t really have shop bought cakes and biscuits.  I loved baking days as a child, although I don’t know whether my mum did particularly, especially on the days when we weren’t at school and could ‘help’ her.  I am thinking of introducing baking day back into my domestic routine.  It’s a lovely idea. It just depends if my waistline can take it more than anything.

I turned to Nigella for inspiration, and so that I could knock a few more recipes off of my list.  So that I wouldn’t eat all the raw ingredients I made myself lunch first.  I had toasted halloumi with beetroot and lime salad.  It was delicious.  The recipe in the book was about as simple as it sounds, so I jazzed it up a bit by using beetroot that had been pickled with juniper (nom) and pomegranate seeds and sweet, baby plum tomatoes, along with some peppery green leaves.

That slowed down the ingestion of cake mix rather.

First I made Devil’s Food Cake. I was slightly underwhelmed.  I could not get my ganache to set properly, despite following her instructions to the letter. It still ended up like chocolate soup.  Also I thought the sponge was rather bland, given all the faffing you had to do to make it devilish rather than a bog standard chocolate sponge.  The chocolate cake recipe in Feast is much, much better in my opinion.

Then I made what Nigella calls blondies.  My understanding of blondies is that they are brownies with white chocolate in them.  This is not what I made.  They were more like flap jacks with chocolate chips in that you welded together with condensed milk.  Nothing wrong with them.  In fact they were very nice, but definitely more flap jackish than brownie ish.

Then I made chocolate chip cookies, which were perfectly nice, and which the children like.  They didn’t rock my world, but as they only take about twenty five minutes to make from start to finish, they could become a staple of my baking afternoons.

For dinner we had savoury barbecue mince.  It had cloves and all spice in.  I did not like this much.  It wasn’t horrible, but I can think of less unusual and more comforting ways to eat mince.

Still it knocked five more things off of my recipe tally, my husband and children love me, and the house still smells of baked biscuits, so it’s not all bad.  Plus it kept me toasty warm all afternoon.

So the whole day was basically about cake and books, and that’s got to be good really, even if I was too poorly to go and trip the light fantastic

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