I swear this is not the only thing I do ...

... but sometimes it feels like its the only creative thing I do ...

Chocolate cupcakes. Coffee glaze icing. Strawberry hearts.

For a Baby Shower last weekend.

Kinda cute don't you think?

bundt envy

'Twas the weekend for it so I made this delicious cake from the fabulous gibberlicious blog.
I couldn't be less of a vegetarian but I'm a big veggie fan and have been greatly inspired by the Gibber's recipes and great step-by-step photos.
Any one of their dishes would make an awesome accompaniment to a fat juicy steak.

It also seemed an appropriate way to celebrate the last of our lemons. Our tree's finally given up its Type A tendency to over-produce and it looks like sometime soon we may have to (gasp) purchase lemons.

This Lemon & Buttermilk cake's a keeper. Or in this case, Lemon & Yoghurt 'cos I was too much in my pyjamas to go to the shop. Yup, I heated yoghurt. I'm fearless I tell you.

 Of course I don't have a big bundt like Rika, but enough of this cake should remedy that soon enough ...

a happy time

Frieda spent last Thursday evening at Granny's. Something she's not done since I was in hospital having Stella.

Parenting truly does ruin your life. You spend so much time wishing for some peace and quiet, but when you do get a little break, and come home to the prospect of no manic supper and bath-time with your lively child, you find the house boringly empty. You don't know what to do with yourself. You miss the little blighter.

Stella however became extraordinarily loud that evening. Squeals and yelps of delight. Was she ...
a) filling the void
b) taking the gap, or
c) always so loud but we don't notice when her much louder big sister's around?

Not that there was time to relax or anything. Oh no, there was cake to be baked, fridge tart to make, pink squishy meringues to remake (seems I may have compromised my baking mojo with this post). There were balloons to be blown up and lots more preparation for The Third Birthday Party on Friday.

Funny story: ages ago Frieda requested a Fish cake and I duly started working on designs. In fact, she and I had a fun afternoon with an A3 sheet of paper and her crayons, conceptualising the whole event (I'll make an event coordinator of her yet). Imagine my horror when 3 days before the big day she started talking about the dog cake she was having for her party. Wtf?
She was mentioning it often enough that I was getting a bit nervous that we might be heading for some kind of disappointed breakdown should it not materialise. But like hell was I going to change the plans for THIS beauty ...

Hey? Hey? God, I'm proud.

I decided the success would be in the billing and, when revealing this work of cake wonder, I pronounced it a Dogfish Cake.
I think she was pleased, do you?

(Please note outfit from when she was a flower-girl at a cousin's wedding recently. Pearls on a 3 yr old are really not my style. But secretly I think they're kinda cute ...)

Kiddie party on Friday was followed by family do on Sunday (the actual day). More cake, more presents, more delicious celebrations.

And just like that, I have a 3 year old.
Shew.

crap photo, great cake

You wouldn't believe I'm supposed to be cutting back on wheat and dairy would you? (For the baby of course.)
You wouldn't believe we're still not well.
You wouldn't believe how much happier this cake made us.
Nom nom nom.
Hello May.

sweet 'n sour

Sour ...
~ the respiratory issues in this family would make one think we live in an asbestos box. Husband and Child's coughs persist and my good news this morning is that I've chronic sinusitis, need antibiotics and have been issued a cortisone asthma pump for the duration of winter.
~ at exactly 6pm on Saturday evening Stella started screaming. It lasted for half an hour. The next night for an hour. The psychological wounds left from Frieda's 3 months of colic painfully re-opened.
~ Frieda's tantrums (which I've not had the heart to blog out yet) have become so ridiculously based on nothing that she had a 45-minute-verging-on-autistic meltdown recently because I didn't fold a baby blanket to her exacting specifications.
~ the custardy filling on the super delicious lemon tart we made this weekend.

Sweet ...
~ we celebrated Stella's one month birthday on Sunday.
~ the meringue topping on aforementioned lemon tart.
~ due to my bad health I qualified to receive one of the last remaining flu vaccines in the country. Score!
~ the only reason we had a second child (besides the whole duty sibling thing) was because we'd heard about a local pharmacy's homebrew colic 'miracle cure' and get this: it works!
~ being reminded of heart-meltingly divine things about babies such as the tiniest balls of fluff which hide in the hollow between their thumbs and forefingers.
~ Frieda's endless games in which I'm Mummy Chicken/Dinosaur/Rabbit/Wildebeest, she's Big Sister Chicken/Dinosaur etc etc and Stella is Baby Sister Chicken ... yada yada yada - she's a complete Jekyll and Hyde child at the moment, but when she's the good one (I momentarily forget which is which), she's divine.

And as for that tart ... the recipe calls it Marie-Therese Amichaud-Debize's Lemon Tart which is just fucking pretentious. I prefer to call it -
The Very Nice Lemon Tart which is Not Lemon Meringue No Matter How Much Husband Insists that it Is.
Or something like that.
Here goes ...

Basic blind-baked shortcrust pastry (buy it, make it - Marie-Therese would probably give a rat's ass, I don't)

Lemon Custard Filling:
Beat together juice of 2 lemons, 2 cups milk, 4 tbsp castor sugar, 2 tbsp cake flour, 1 tbsp cornflour, 2 egg yolks and 1 whole egg.
The recipe says heat over a bain-marie but you know what? I cooked this in the microwave (shock! horror!), zapping it for 30 seconds at a time and whisking well inbetween until custard thickened.

Let custard cool a bit then pour into pie crust.

Beat 2 egg whites with 6 tbsps of castor sugar, spread over the top and bake at 170 degrees for 15-20 minutes. You could grill it a bit too if you'd like the meringue to darken significantly.

I can't explain exactly why it's not traditional Lemon Meringue. The lemony layer is not as tart as usual, more a velvety custard, and the meringue is not intended to be very light and fluffy, just a nice sweet topping. And while I'll always be a huge fan of LM, this was a nice alternative and much quicker to make (what with the cough, microwaving 'n all).
Either way, Stella loved it and that's what counts right?

wake 'n bake

I'll freely admit to a time in my life when waking 'n baking on a Saturday morning meant something completely different, but today it meant just that. Wake (at 06:30 with child) and then, Bake.

We came home from holiday with two manky black bananas in the bottom of our food crate. Usually I whack ones like that in the freezer for making smoothies at some stage (frozen banana is a wonder-ingredient in a smoothie, when blended they go so creamy its as if you added, well, cream), but when I sat down to catch up on some blogs I took it as a sign that there were two posts about banana bread/cake waiting in my Reader.

Grandma Goot's recipe won over Aunty Betty's - 'cos its got chocolate in it of course - tho' I'm sure Heather's could totally handle the addition of some broken up chocolate pieces. And actually, if you compare apples bananas with apples bananas, they're virtually the same recipe.
I'm sure my thighs won't notice the difference. Oh ja, except I made the one with chocolate in it ...

(Of which Blogger will not let me add a picture. Go check out the recipe and take my word for it, it looked just like Julochka's.)

Oh and did I say holiday? Dude, we had the best time. More on that later.

my year of cake: that orange one

I'm not going to do anything crazy like promise to make 100 cakes or nuffink. I think we all learnt from the famous 100 crafts in 2009 fiasco that I'm no good at things like that.

('tho I did reach 42 which is supposed to be the answer to the Life, the Universe and Everything so maybe there was something in that ...)

However, one of the things I've learnt from my husband (along with how to make a popping noise with my finger and my mouth, how to put up shelves and how to make jam - he's very diverse), is an appreciation for cake. I was never a big fan, preferring cheesecake or pecan pie or lemon meringue, but my man's shown me what cake can really be, and liberated my thinking around cake requiring a special occasion, as opposed to a random Sunday morning desire to bake.

So this is simply an attempt to share some cake-awesomeness, and a pictorial record (though probably not a very good one) of some of the gluttony we sometimes succumb to in our home.

Kicking off with:

Orange Cake

6 eggs, separated
2 cups sugar
2 cups cake flour
4 tsp baking powder (ja, really)
pinch of salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup orange juice (preferably freshly squeezed from an actual orange)
1 tsp orange zest
1 tsp creme of tartar

Beat egg yolks with the sugar until foamy and light.

Stir in oil, OJ and zest.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together then add to eggy mix bit-by-bit beating well.

Beat egg whites and creme of tartar to soft peaks and then fold into rest of mix, mixing it through quite thoroughly but not so that the whites lose their fluffiness.

Pour into greased cake tins and bake in a pre-heated oven at 175 degrees Celsius for approx. 35 mins.
(Anyone who bakes knows that this time depends on your oven, best is to set a timer for 30 minutes and then come back and check on your cake regularly after that.)

There's something about the addition of the orange juice which not only gives the cake a lovely colour, but keeps it sticky and moist. It's very light (as it should be with all that baking powder), but has a weight to it that I sometimes find lacking in a Victoria Sponge, and a lovely creamy subtle citrus flavour.

For icing there's a number of options. Plain buttercream would work, as would a cream cheese icing as one would use for carrot cake. Martha's 7 minute frosting (too lazy to Google it but it's out there) would be yummy with its meringue flavour but as I'm supposed to be avoiding raw egg I haven't tried that yet.
Both times I've made this cake I wanted the whitest icing I could achieve, to offset the yellowy orange of the cake. So I found a recipe for White Frosting and went with that. It sounds weird but bear with me ...

White Frosting ala Me
Slowly, very slowly warm 1/2 cup milk on the stovetop. I add a vanilla pod to the milk for this step.
Remove pod and slowly stir in 2 tbl spoons of flour, stirring until a thick smooth paste forms. Take off the stove and leave to cool.

In a separate bowl cream together 1/2 cup butter (or, ideally, vegetable shortening which has no colour. Unfortunately it's a real bitch to get here so I just use butter) and about a cup of icing sugar. You can really use as much or as little sugar as you like, sweeten to taste if you will.

Add flour and milk paste to the butter mix and then just beat (only, only with an electric beater - to save your arms) until you gradually lose the yellow butter colour. This does happen though it takes a while. I then added most of the seeds from the vanilla pod and grated a whole lot more orange zest into the icing before slapping it onto the cake.

Next time I might make half again the quantity of icing as you can see in both pics I was a little short.

[I must just say that part of my cake love motivation has been two Christmas presents I got this year, the beyootiful white cake stand just begs to be used and my SIL gave me one of those dispenser thingies with 4 different types of sprinkles - such fun.]