Pistachio petit-four cake.

I have had a fascination with this cake for some considerable number of months.  I've been wanting to make it and wanting to make it and wanting to make for AGES.  I very much love Deb's Smitten Kitchen  blog - so much so that I pre-ordered her cookbook the day it came out and I'm waiting with bated breath for it to show up.  In the meantime, I'm baking my way through the back numbers - which brought me here.

I was explaining the cake to Will - while we were eating enormous steaks, now I think about it - and bemoaning the fact that it's hard to make for work and anyway was enough of a spectacle that it really needed an event suitable for it.  Whereupon Will invited me to his birthday bash, which involves approaching 20 people in his parents' beautiful house, barbecuing, eating and drinking...  Also plenty of chasing about with two labradoodles, one of whom was clearly designed to be in a cartoon, trying to make friends with the horses and biting nails over the Olympics.  Brilliant.

The cake itself is remarkably easy to make.  That's sort of the thing about baking - you do one step after the other, just like the recipe says, and it all comes right in the end.  You do have to measure, and it is worth doing the little things that seem fussy, like weighing your batter into the tins to make sure they're the same thickness or browning the nuts before you grind them...and when you do that, it all works.  I only had 2 cake pans for a 3 layer cake, so I did a lot of weighing out of ingredients and dividing them so that I could bake in stages.

Producing the cake was overkill.  Totally.  It was enormously excessive and unnecessary, and went down brilliantly.  I will do it again.

Dalek Snail Cake?

It was my birthday last Saturday, which was four days before Traci left the country on Wednesday - so we had an enormous party...it seemed the least we could do.  We borrowed some bits and pieces from the ADC (we love John, and knowing all the management there) - like the festooooon (You Must Say It So) above, and a UV tube to make our glow-in-the-dark-gin-and-tonic-jelly glow.  About half past ten, though, Hugh sat on that.  *rolls eyes*.  And then left in a hurry to catch the last train back to London. *rolls eyes*.  The festoon made the garden look fantastic and I'm annoyed I failed at pictures for it - we trailed it out of our bedroom window, along the perspex roof above the grape vine and then into the trees in the garden - so everything was pink and orange.

It was a great night, and a wonderful climax to our time in Argyle Street.  I like this house and it's location.  I hate trying to park round here, but that's another story.  I have loved living with Traci and Carl.  It's a family of a house, and I like that.  We eat together, stare at TV together, have parties together.  One of the things I'm least looking forward to is living on my own without even the ratties for company.

It hasn't really sunk in yet that Traci won't be back from the US in 'just a few weeks', which is what I sort of think my head has been believing.  Have to get used to the idea that I'm not going to see a great deal of her face to face for the next 18 months or so.  She doesn't really believe, I think, that how happy I have been in the last year is down to her presence in my life.  Even far away, she's still part of my existence and that is unbelievably important to me.  Expect many pointless pieces of post, Traci...

I mostly wanted to share with you the following.

 

 

 

 

 

Bet nobody ELSE, chef's girlfriend or not, has EVER had a Dalek Snail made out of chocolate and glued together with seas of caramel icing crafted in their honour.

 

Oven gripe, but eventual cake.

So far I appear to be having baking disasters in the new house. The first time I made the lemon cake in our new oven, the wretched device burnt the bottom. Grr. That's what you get with a gas oven, I guess - much harder to predict, especially if you're used to the even cooking of an electric fan oven. But this is an odd thing anyway - all the gas ovens I've seen before have the heat source low down at the back of the cavity, along the line where the back of the oven joins the base of it. In this one, the heat is in a strip along the centre of the floor of the oven, running from front to back. That means that the heat rises straight up, making the base of whatever you put in very hot indeed. With the heat at the back you generate a circular convection current, meaning that whatever you put into the middle of the oven has heat going all around it instead of being fired from one directino all the time. Of course you're going to cook the side of whatever it is near the back of the oven faster, but you can easily turn it around to get it cooked evenly. It's not like I can flip a cake over to cook the top of it as much as the bottom, or like I can very easily protect the bottom from getting scorched with tin foil or whatever. I had intended to test whether or not it would be possible to shield the bottom or at least spread the heat a bit by putting any trays I can find between the heat source and my cake tin, but a whole OTHER disaster happened after that.

The oven stopped working altogether. ARG.

Of course, I found out it had stopped working as I opened the door to put a trayful of careful prepped raspberry fairy cakes in it. Grr. It was always dodgy to light, but I'd got that figured out - it just needs quite a large volume of gas running through it before it will consent to ignite - you just have to hold your nerve... It has a heat switch like many gas appliances do, whereby you have to keep your finger on the button for a few seconds after ignition until some heat has been generated, otherwise the gas shuts off. The idea is that if the flame goes out, the jet won't keep pumping gas into your kitchen creating a potentially lethal fire hazard. All well and good. But that switch doesn't seem to be registering heat now - however long you keep your finger on the dial, when you take it off the gas shuts off and your oven goes out. This makes baking fairy cakes impossible. Eleanor and I ended up in the car clutching bowls of cake mixture in a variety of hues and driving across town to bake them in John and Will's oven. We cleaned their kitchen in payment, and Will's in Japan in any case, but it WAS annoying. Landlord has been contacted.

Don't get me started on the fact that the shower has burst a pipe.

At least we got the boiler fixed and we can have baths with hot water instead...






















Raspberry cupcakes
6oz caster sugar
6oz soft butter (it was warm enough on Saturday that I kept having to freeze the butter so that it didn't just run away!)
3 eggs, separated
6oz plain flour
2 scant tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
12oz (300g) raspberries - fresh or frozen (one third of these will go in the icing, but it all needs making into puree)

Icing (this is for my favourite blue smiley face cakes)
100g plain white fondant
Few drops blue food colouring
2oz soft butter
4oz icing sugar
A small quantity of jam
More icing sugar for dusting

Also - one oven (that works) preheated to 200 degrees centigrade and a 12 hole deep muffin tin and corresponding papercases.

First make the raspberry puree. This is easier in the microwave, especially if you're using frozen berries. In a heatproof bowl, heat the raspberries until they turn mushy - try not to boil them. You can do it in a pan, too. When everything is liquid, run it through a sieve and put the resulting puree in a pan. Boil to reduce by half. This now needs to cool - I just put it in a cold bowl and stirred it while my lovely assistant made the rest of the batter. You could (shock) plan in advance and leave this to cool properly. Try not to eat it all on yoghurt - this is a problem I regularly suffer from when faced with raspberry puree.

To make the cakes, beat together the sugar and the butter with an electric beater, or a wooden spoon if you have more energy than that. Beat in the egg yolks. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually beat in two thirds of the raspberry puree. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites to the soft peak stage. Take one spoonful of the eggs whites and stir it into the rest of the batter to loosen it, and then fold in the rest of the whites.

Divide the batter between your twelve muffin tins - they should be full to within about 1cm from the top.

Check your oven is still working. If it is*, bake the cakes for 12 or so minutes, until lightly browned and cooked through. They'll be a wonderful pinky purply colour. Test with a cocktail stick.

While the cakes cool, make the icing. Beat together 2oz of sifted icing sugar with 2 oz of soft butter. Drip in about 2tsps of the reserved raspberry puree and beat again. Continue adding raspberry puree until abotu half of what was left has been added, and then beat in the remaining sugar. The rest of the puree you can pour over yoghurt or eat with a spoon...

If you are lucky and have a chef girlfriend, you might have piping tips lying about somewhere along with some disposable piping bags. If not, you can roll up a cone of greaseproof to use, or cut the corner off a square sandwich bag. Whatever your medium, fill it with the pink goo and put to one side.

Mash together the fondant with the blue colouring until a uniform baby blue colour.

Heat a tablespoonful of jam and then run it through a sieve so it's smooth. Brush the top of each cake with this to act as glue.

When the cakes are cool, dust your work surface with icing sugar and roll out the fondant to a couple of millimetres thick. Cut circles using a glass or a biscuit cutter, and stick these to the cakes. Pipe your chosen designs on top, then leave to dry before eating.

By this point on Saturday, housewarming party guests started arriving, and I'd done *NO* cleaning. Such is life... They didn't seem to mind that much, there were cupcakes...

*If it's not, round up one friend, ring up another one (waking him up in the process) and ask in a state of fluster if you can come round and use his oven. Drive all the way across town and bake your cakes there, drive back, making the friend you took with you late for her lunch date... *sigh*.

Busyness, sort of.

Well. Much chaos. Excuse the messy desk - it's tidier now, but Tolly was trying to help me type. Cleo had her op, which went fine, though she's less than impressed at having to wear a lampshade and take pills. Tolly's been the funny one though; he's been absolutely all over us, demanding attention and playing and all sorts. I think he's been quite lonely, especially to begin with when Cleo would only hiss at him any time he came near her. He's been chasing down newspaper and flies and all sorts of things, not to mention my leg and my fingers. The one I like best is below (though they're all much of a muchness), but there are more here, here, here and here. He's a silly kitten. Sorry about the messy room - I was busy tidying at the time, and Tolly was assisting, by deconstructing the newspaper.



We went to see the LLAMAS on Friday night! They're SO COOL. The two we're probably getting are called Pepper and Brandy - Pepper's dark brown, and Brandy's a mix of ginger and cream with a skewbald face. They're boys, and will be somewhere over 18 months old when we get them. That won't be til Autumn/Spring, because we need to fence the place properly and build them a shed and the like. YAY LLAMAS. We'll need to do a fair amount of handling of them, and train them to take a head collar properly so we can walk them in the woods. LLAMA WALKS. YAY!!!!

I've been staying at the Village Hall in Paul with the Pinafore cast for the last couple of nights. I went with them to the Meadery in Penzance on Friday night, post llamas. (People have been asking me about whether I was REALLY late because I was at a llama farm. I could say yes. How cool is THAT??) This was a very silly evening all round - films again here and here. This was not the half of the debauchery that went on. Very entertaining.

I spent Saturday making Becky Thomas a birthday cake, of which I'm actually quite proud - large and pink and filled with strawberries and butter-cream. Excessively sickly and very pink, but that was the specification. I sang with them in church in Paul this morning, too. Nothing MASSIVELY exciting - Stainer's I Saw The Lord - but it was really nice to be singing with a big group of big voices. I didn't stick out! Yay! And so many men, and I didn't have to sing tenor, though I did sing second alto, which is actually pretty similar, because there were more sops than altos. Nice. I'm heading back with them tomorrow to see Twelfth Night at the Minack, and then to deliver timps on Tuesday, and then to see the talent night and cook ANOTHER cake on Wednesday. Lots of drifting about Cornish roads. I'm beginning to think I should just stay there all this week, but it seems a bit harsh on my family and I do want to see my animals.

Erk. I'm SO tired, despite all I've done today was the service this morning and lying on a beach reading all afternoon...