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Let Them Make Cake

October 10, 2011 By 8 Comments

After a blustery morning in the park I decided it was just Too Much to ask of my hair to spend more hours being flung about in the wind, so instead we stayed in to make cakes. What else?

Little cupcakes, frosted with buttercream I showed Fitz the picture in the baking book and he immediately declared that he wanted cakes. This isn’t unusual. Lately he’s been known to suggest cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so I’m left in no doubt he really is my son (need I say he doesn’t get it? Well, he doesn’t. I am mean, and consume unhealthy treats after he’s gone to bed). However, he did understand me when I said we had to make them first (scone baking sessions paying dividends), possibly hatching his plan to cover himself in flour from head to foot that very second.

It ended up being the most interactive baking session we’ve had so far, with him enthusiastically tipping the butter and sugar in, giving the eggs a beat, and getting way too excited with the flour bag. Note to self: when you’ve finished with the flour, put the bag back in the cupboard. I confess it was me who got the food colouring out but he wouldn’t have it, and I had to settle for making pretty buttercream icing instead.

The buttercream was an afterthought, just to use up the already softened butter that was left over. It’s a simple recipe:
use 1/4 butter to icing (confectioner’s) sugar – I had 50g butter, and around 200g of sugar. Beat the butter in a bowl until creamy in colour and texture. Add the sugar and mix in well, using 2-3 tablespoons of milk to loosen the mixture – add these gradually, as needed. Flavour with vanilla, rose, orange, coffee…, and add a bit of food colouring if you fancy it a bit pretty.
Then I went overboard, and piped it on. I’ve never piped icing before in my life, but now I want to pipe everything. I’m really excited by the baking possibilities for winter days. By spring my ass is going to be Huge with a capital Hu.

And the cakes themselves? Delicious as well as pretty, and there are even some left over for tomorrow.

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz Tagged With: , , , - 8 Comments

Mini Book Review: Sewing For Boys

September 18, 2011 By 6 Comments

I’ve had Sewing For Boys on pre-order since I first heard about it earlier in the year, and having tried a Figgy’s pattern in the meantime, my anticipation was set to High.

Then I started getting emails from Amazon, about the release date being moved back, and then back a bit more, and then back even further, and then forward a little bit, until finally I got a despatch email.

You’d think after all of that I’d have been chomping at the bit to get started, wouldn’t you? And I am, but in a low key sort of way that has absolutely nothing to do with the book.

I love the book already, you see. It has longevity, since the patterns can be made for boys up to about 7 or 8, depending on the size of your boy. The patterns are practical, and cool, but not twee. It has small projects (t-shirt refashioning, t-shirts, simple trousers) and larger ones (jackets, smart trousers). The patterns are printed on high quality thick paper, and are stored in a neat envelope inside the front cover. It’s also internally spiral bound, so it will store nicely and then lie flat on your worktable.

I’ve already picked out these treasure pocket pants as the first project I’ll make, since we’re coming home with my pockets laden with conkers and acorns and stones. And leaves. Except he doesn’t call them that – he runs up and thrusts a bronze leaf into my hand, saying excitedly “another fire!” And they do look like little fires.

Anyway if I’m so thrilled to finally have the book in my possession, why am I not sewing already?

Do I need to say more? This is where I sew. This is now officially known as the Room of Doom, and this is actually after an hour of tidying up. It was much worse. The downside of having a loft conversion is that everything that used to be stored elsewhere has been swept down through the house on an invisible tidal wave, and ended up swilling about in the little room at the back of the house.

I’m displaced. I wander around in the evenings saying “I’m sure I used to do things”, but not having quite enough oomph to sort it all out. This week I bought a shredder. If shredding is as much fun as I think it will be I can’t see much in this room surviving.

Anyway, all that aside, if you have boys to sew for, I think you should get the book. It’s exactly what you’re looking for, and I do know how long you’ve been looking. Come back sometime in January when I’ve managed to get near the sewing machine and I’ll tell you how I get on with those pants.

Filed Under: book review, Making for Mothers, Sewing Tagged With: , , - 6 Comments

Then there was Cake

September 14, 2011 By 4 Comments

I was overcome in the week before Fitz’s birthday when I found out that my friend was baking a Peppa Pig cake for her daughter, who’s only one day older than my boy (we were in the hospital at the same time. If I’d been quicker about it they would have shared a birthday. Oh if only I’d been quicker about it.). I panic-bought a book about icing cakes in the shape of tank engines, before remembering that my son truly is my son, and that a chocolate cake would be more than exciting.

Besides – imagine if you pulled out all your cake decorating stops when the child is only two. You’d have nowhere left to go by the time they were six…

So a chocolate sponge was born, and this week both halves made it out of the oven and onto the worktop, rather than the floor. The recipe was a Nigella one again, but she likes to bung hers in the food processor all at once – sometimes I don’t hold with her shortcuts. I did a sponge method instead, and yes, the effort was rewarded, by not one but two chocolate cake nay-sayers pronouncing it lovely and light. As light as it can be under the weight of chocolate butter icing, I guess.

You know, the most fun was sitting with Mr J and sticking on the chocolate buttons, and not just because you get to put one on the cake and then one in your mouth. It was our heady anticipation of the boy’s glee at being given an entire cake. It was talking about whether or not he’d do his excited hands (he did) and whether he’d say it was “amazin’!” (he did).

Next year we’ll even talk about whether he’ll have a huge sugar high and race around the house on his trike non-stop for half an hour once he’s eaten it. That is, if I’m not too busy sculpting a fire engine out of sugar paste…

Filed Under: Baking, Fitz, Making for Mothers - 4 Comments

Cheese, Onion & Potato Pies.

September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Fitz’s second birthday is galloping towards us at pace, & we have sensibly decided not to have a party. At least not one that involves other people and children running around on a sugar high, but we will have a small family party, here at home.

Since I expect he will be too excited to eat too much, I’m keeping it simple. It’s the same reason we’ve been opening birthday presents as they are given, rather than saving them up for a big overwhelming morning of paper ripping. The table will have:
  • cheese, onion & potato pies
  • cocktail sausages
  • breadsticks, carrot sticks & hoummous
  • bear shaped jellies
  • blackberries
  • a chocolate cake
I want it to look like a party table, but not be groaning. If there are too many leftovers I’ll be the one eating them, since Fitz will be back on his usual healthy fayre, and I have no need of extra cheese on my hips.

These little pies are perfect for adding a little rib-sticking stuff to slow down the progress of sugar into the bloodstream, but still not something I would feed him every day. As the recipe is available online, I include it here, in case you want to give it a try.

Cheese, Onion & Potato Pies

I won’t the recipe for shortcrust pastry since everyone has their favourite, & mine is from Tamsin Day-Lewis (Sorry, Nigella, but yours is so unnecessarily fiddly), but you will need a quantity of shortcrust made with 10-12oz of flour. And I’ve had equally good results with bought shortcrust so no snobbery about that particular shortcut either.

I do follow Nigella’s suggestion to use a yorkshire pudding tin (the kind with four shallow indentations) as I like the kind of rustic pasty they produce. You will need two of these, or you could always use individual flan tins.

 

For the Filling:

500g waxy potatoes, diced
125g Cheddar or double Goucester, 75g grated, 50g diced
50g Red Leicester, grated
2 tbsp Parmesan, grated
6 Spring onions (about 100g), sliced
4 tbsp creme fraiche
2 tbsp chopped parsley
  1. Prepare your pastry: separate into two, wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
  2. Boil the potatoes in water for about 10 minutes until cooked through, then drain and set aside.
  3. In a large bowl combine the cheeses, spring onions, slightly cooled potato and parsley. Bind with the creme fraiche and season with salt & pepper.
  4. Roll out one pastry disc and cut out 8 rough circles slightly larger than the indents, and push 4 into the first tray. Fill generously with an eighth of the mixture. Use the remaining circles as lids for the pies. Seal the edges with a knife, pulling the base edge up and over the edge of the lid.
  5. Repeat with the second lot of pastry and the second tray. Brush both lots with egg or milk if desired.
  6. Cook in the oven for 20 minutes, until a pale golden colour. Let the pies cool in the tins a little, before easing them out of the tin.
Terrific eaten warm, but equally good cold.

Taken from How to be a Domestic Goddess, by Nigella Lawson

Available online, with US measurements at the Food Network.

Filed Under: Baking, Making for Mothers Tagged With: , , , , - Leave a Comment

A disaster

September 6, 2011 By 3 Comments

There is nothing quite like watching one half of your husband’s birthday cake slide off the oven shelf in slow motion, while you reach out to stop it with a bare hand, grasp the tin, think twice, and then see the perfect sponge splatter onto the floor. Nothing quite like it at all.

Undeterred (that’s not strictly true – I was extremely deterred for a couple of hours) I cut the other one in half and sandwiched it with creme fraiche and strawberry jam. It was delicious, but there was a little part of me always thinking ‘but it could have been twice the size’. Eeyore. That’s me.

 

 

Filed Under: Baking, Life Tagged With: , - 3 Comments
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