jane brocket

stir-up sunday ii

More fruit, more booze, more Nigel, more stirring, more wishes. Heck, I'm beginning to think we should make a Christmas cake every Sunday.

unorthodox

We made a Christmas cake on 22 November (this year's 'Stir Up Sunday', traditionally the day for making the pudding, but as we don't keep to rules, we made a cake instead).

True to form, however, we have already eaten it. It was good.

a large number

When there is a forest on candles on your birthday cake, you begin to wonder if you are burnt out,

or still burning brightly.

But after spending too much time thinking about the implications of reaching a landmark birthday, I've decided it's 'not all bad' as Jim White says in the best article I've read on the subject. So I'll keep smiling and carry on.

{Jim White used to go to the same parties as me and my friends when we were seventeen. He was an acknowledged heartthrob and we spent a great deal of time discussing him at school. At 50 he doesn't appear to have lost his wit - or his looks.}

{Thanks to Phoebe for making my cake and for unearthing all the candles; I had no idea we had that many in the house.}

positively the last...

...cake photo for a while. Until I change my mind, that is.

Simon bought this cake tin for Phoebe for her birthday so she had to put it to immediate use. Being something of a perfectionist (see post below), she wasn't happy with the first version which was far too small in her opinion. 

She also felt it was a mistake to use chocolate fudge icing for reasons that were visually clear but don't need to be explained (even though it tasted great). So she made a second cake and decorated it with jelly bean candles and wickedly pink icing, and all was well.

And the happy outcome is that we won't be needing much cake for a while.

attention to detail

This is my brilliant assistant, who helps me with recipes and baking for books, getting a cake ready to be photographed. And I wonder why my tweezers are covered in sticky icing.

She doesn't always feel the need to pick off wrongly placed sprinkles but it's a measure of her commitment to earning money that, on this occasion, she did. (And she made the whole thing.)

Of course it's Phoebe.

a large porschen of fun

Peggy Porschen has long been one of our baking idols, but for a long time I wasn't aware that she runs workshops in London. As soon as I did find out, however, I booked birthday treat places for me and Phoebe on Saturday for a day of decorating Hallowe'en cookies. (Phoebe believes she should have been born on 31st October, and that there was a serious mix-up when she arrived a few days before her appointed date).

What I like so much about Peggy's style is the mix of clever designs, beautiful colour, attention to detail, humour, and incredible skill. What's even more amazing is that Peggy manages to teach these skills in a way that makes them seem easy and doable, even for the most untrained icing hands. She reduces years of practice and technical know-how into a few key techniques which allow workshop participants to stop worrying about not having Cordon Bleu qualifications and to start icing.

As ever, Phoebe and I had a great time together with sugar and paste. We couldn't believe we were really watching Peggy Porschen demonstrating with icing bags and colour, and not just looking at the pages of her books. Neither of us would claim to be great icing artists but we were amused by what we produced and inspired to get cracking with more PP ideas. Watch this cookie and cake space.

real and imaginary

 

Phoebe is terrified of spiders. Yet at the weekend she quite happily made a super-huge, creepy-crawly spider when we went together to a one-day cake decorating workshop with Frances McNaughton (who was involved with the amazing TV and press Skoda adverts). We spent six hours decorating a dozen buns each, squeezing, piping, rolling, pressing and cutting. It was great fun and our cakes looked fabulous, especially the scary spider.

It made me laugh the next day, though, when I saw this beautiful web covered in droplets of rain and Phoebe wouldn't come anywhere near it.

I think it's a shame so many people don't like spiders (British spiders are not exactly threatening). Then again,there are also plenty of people who are scared of cakes.

wishful thinking

Weightless, calorie-free marmalade buns with juicy orange icing.

What the heck, I eat them anyway.

                                                        ***

I want to thank all those who have commented on the last few posts and everyone else who visits this blog, especially those who keep coming back regularly. I have been blogging now for four and a half years and that's a long time not only in the world of computers, but also in any individual's life. Needless to say, there have been good times and bad times, and I think I can safely say I am now amply qualified to write or talk about the experience of blogging  - something that is very different to the discussions of the role, nature and contents of blogs and their writers, and that has yet to be discussed in depth anywhere except on blogs themselves. And maybe one day I will. But in the meantime, please know that I love having you here to visit.

cartoon cake © phoebe

queenly tart

 

Oh, the joy of being able to bake again. Despite the fact that we still have horrible a temporary work surface that precludes kneading bread and makes rolling out pastry tricky, I just could not resist making a greengage tart at the weekend.

I can't decide whether I prefer the French or English name for this fruit. 'Reine Claude' has such style and sounds lovely, but then again 'greengage' sounds lovely, too (which is why I think 'The Greengage Summer is such a wonderful title for a novel). Sadly, though, we don't see enough of either in England to be bothered about what we should be calling them; we should just be glad to see them at all.

As I'm still in a Julia Child-inspired cooking and baking mode, I decided a good, old-fashioned, large, queen-sized greengage and almond tart would be the best way to use up my precious greengages. I looked at Julia's recipes for tarts and took her advice and applied it to the recipe in Jane Grigson's Fruit Book. I am a sucker for this sort of patisserie and enjoy the various processes involved (even though in France it's perfectly acceptable to serve beautiful tarts from the local patisserie instead of making them at home). Maybe if we lived near a fabulous patisserie I'd buy my tarts, but as Messieurs Sainsbury and Waitrose don't fall into that class, I don't.

We are still experimenting with our new oven and having to keep a sense of humour about the results, but the tart came out fine and dandy and was eaten in one sitting by my poor, patisserie-starved family.