the cake's for my Mum, the making's for me
Yesterday I bought raisins and sultanas from the Spice of Life, and mixed peel, dark brown muscovado sugar and half a dozen free range eggs.
"Someone's baking," observed the woman at the till, and she wasn't wrong.
I got the almonds and glacé cherries from Tesco; ethics be hanged for now, they package groceries in much more manageable quantities than do my local organic wholefood suppliers. Picked up butter there, too, and cartons of apple and orange juice to soak the fruit in. The lemon came from the greengrocers next door. I chose the biggest, best looking one there, because really I only wanted it for its zest; I didn't let the skin's sungleamy sheen beguile me, though. I know that a lemon's lustre lies, speaking more of bigblackshellac than it does quality.
Plain flour and baking powder were waiting for me in the kitchen cupboards at home, with the spices, and a new packet of currants - originally destined for the Welsh cakes I never quite finished making earlier in the year - had been lying in one of the drawers under my divan bed for months.
I weighed out the dried fruit yesterday afternoon. I should have no sympathy for the stuff, hating it as I do, but it's a sad phrase that. 'Dried fruit'. A sad fate for a grape, surely! Plucked in its prime, its ripe roundness, and left to wither and shrivel, gasping for its lost juices. No wonder the dried out raisins, currants and sultanas drank up so greedily from the fruit juices I sloshed over them, growing plump and fleshy overnight while I slept. I looked in on them this morning and they were bright and swollen, a stickyglistening jewel pile, studded about with cherries like great round rubies.
(Couldn't eat the stuff, though. Biting down on an unexpected raisin can have me gagging)
Creaming together the butter and sugar had me thinking of ducks and treacle. It's treacly stuff, muscovado, more molasses than mallard. Strong flavoured and sticky. I remember red and gold tins of black treacle in the kitchen cupboards of my childhood, stuff with a similar dark kick to it, but what the devil did we use it for? It can't have been all gingerbread, and there certainly wasn't any toffee got out of it. I have dim impressions of sucking fingers dipped into the tin, and... treacle sandwiches? Whatever, the lids always ended up rimmed with congealed candy crusts, gathering fluff and flies and dust. Proper tasty.
Eggs broken into cake mixture make funny oily puddles; thinking about the yellow eggplums can make me bilious if I do it too hard. This gloopy stuff shouldn't blend into the creamed butter and sugar, it really shouldn't, but plain old flour usually saves the day, however curdled your cake mix. Sift it in, mind, you've got to do these things proper. Sift it in snowy drifts, try not to breathe in the powder clouds (they'll make you cough).
My zester's stuck in Birmingham somewhere, so I grated the lemon rind, and the nutmeg too. I touched the tip of my tongue to the nutmeg gratings, for all the fun of making it numb.
The cake's cooling now, still in the tin, swaddled in string and greaseproof. It's been cooling for two hours, after three and a half in the oven, and is still warm enough to cosy up my bed nicely, should I decide to tuck it in now. Don't tell me I'm the first to think about warming a wintry bed with a freshbaked fruitcake; much more fragrant than hot bricks, far fewer corners, seems only logical. I'll be cradling no cakes tonight, though, just a kettleful of water in the rubber bottle belly of a plush polar bear. Marks and Spencer's ideas about how to keep me warm at night are a sight more surreal than my own.
"Someone's baking," observed the woman at the till, and she wasn't wrong.
I got the almonds and glacé cherries from Tesco; ethics be hanged for now, they package groceries in much more manageable quantities than do my local organic wholefood suppliers. Picked up butter there, too, and cartons of apple and orange juice to soak the fruit in. The lemon came from the greengrocers next door. I chose the biggest, best looking one there, because really I only wanted it for its zest; I didn't let the skin's sungleamy sheen beguile me, though. I know that a lemon's lustre lies, speaking more of bigblackshellac than it does quality.
Plain flour and baking powder were waiting for me in the kitchen cupboards at home, with the spices, and a new packet of currants - originally destined for the Welsh cakes I never quite finished making earlier in the year - had been lying in one of the drawers under my divan bed for months.
I weighed out the dried fruit yesterday afternoon. I should have no sympathy for the stuff, hating it as I do, but it's a sad phrase that. 'Dried fruit'. A sad fate for a grape, surely! Plucked in its prime, its ripe roundness, and left to wither and shrivel, gasping for its lost juices. No wonder the dried out raisins, currants and sultanas drank up so greedily from the fruit juices I sloshed over them, growing plump and fleshy overnight while I slept. I looked in on them this morning and they were bright and swollen, a stickyglistening jewel pile, studded about with cherries like great round rubies.
(Couldn't eat the stuff, though. Biting down on an unexpected raisin can have me gagging)
Creaming together the butter and sugar had me thinking of ducks and treacle. It's treacly stuff, muscovado, more molasses than mallard. Strong flavoured and sticky. I remember red and gold tins of black treacle in the kitchen cupboards of my childhood, stuff with a similar dark kick to it, but what the devil did we use it for? It can't have been all gingerbread, and there certainly wasn't any toffee got out of it. I have dim impressions of sucking fingers dipped into the tin, and... treacle sandwiches? Whatever, the lids always ended up rimmed with congealed candy crusts, gathering fluff and flies and dust. Proper tasty.
Eggs broken into cake mixture make funny oily puddles; thinking about the yellow eggplums can make me bilious if I do it too hard. This gloopy stuff shouldn't blend into the creamed butter and sugar, it really shouldn't, but plain old flour usually saves the day, however curdled your cake mix. Sift it in, mind, you've got to do these things proper. Sift it in snowy drifts, try not to breathe in the powder clouds (they'll make you cough).
My zester's stuck in Birmingham somewhere, so I grated the lemon rind, and the nutmeg too. I touched the tip of my tongue to the nutmeg gratings, for all the fun of making it numb.
The cake's cooling now, still in the tin, swaddled in string and greaseproof. It's been cooling for two hours, after three and a half in the oven, and is still warm enough to cosy up my bed nicely, should I decide to tuck it in now. Don't tell me I'm the first to think about warming a wintry bed with a freshbaked fruitcake; much more fragrant than hot bricks, far fewer corners, seems only logical. I'll be cradling no cakes tonight, though, just a kettleful of water in the rubber bottle belly of a plush polar bear. Marks and Spencer's ideas about how to keep me warm at night are a sight more surreal than my own.