Category Archives: Baking

22/10
2020

Shortbread is the purity of cake; just flour, butter, sugar, heat and long-term cardiovascular trouble requiring medication and surgical intervention.

I set myself an admittedly silly challenge yesterday as a response to an enormously stressful Tuesday, by applying the sane type of approach that gave the world USA President Donald J. Trump and outsourcing my challenge to Twitter. Anyway, the upshot was to get the divorce process moving and bake a cake of some sort, and somewhat surprisingly keeping my job.

It’s a Jaime Oliver recipe, from his Big Book, so I have no link. He probably has it on his website, or a variation of it. It’s lovely, but heavier than depleted Uranium. A small piece of this could sustain an adult for weeks (and that’s what it was originally supposed to do).

In conclusion, by way of outrageous statement, I’m pretty much an incredible guy. If you met me you would be all “wow, this is pretty much an incredible guy” and I would say ”Well, hey” because I already knew it but enjoyed your realisation of it.

16/10
2020

I know, another crumble! Easy to make, and tasty! I improvised a little, a jazz crumble if you will (that works on several levels for an apple crumble by the way, so it’s even more clever than you realise) by adding a thin shortbread base and some frozen junk from the bottom of the freezer (that’s better than it sounds), if a little dry for crumble. The problem that I have is this; I like cake, and now I’ve discovered that I can quickly and easily make a lot of cake that I like, myself. All the time. If I wanted to, I could just eat cake, becomes a metaphor for the decadence of middle-class privilege.

Anyway, it wasn’t too bad.

07/10
2020

Do you remember when I used to just shitpost here? I would ramble on for a dew paragraphs and then you would wonder what I was at, but I’d get to turn a few breathless phrases here and there. Those were the days. Now, it’s a dumping ground for story videos (where I sort of subvert the medium a bit, but use the WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook Story feature as my stage, where almost no-one appreciates what I do with it) and bad food blogging (where I make simple food using foolproof recipes and occasionally still manage to create terrible meals). Such is life. I’ll come back to both of these soon and actually write something about it, about why I do it.

So, chicken and mushroom pie, with shortbread pastry. Loosely based on this and this. It was a little dry, but very tasty.

31/08
2020

I went there, and I brought it. Behold!

I just love the textures. It’s like the surface of the moon or something.

It tastes magical, and I’m a harsh critic of my own efforts. I don’t know if I’ll do it again soon though, this is pure badness. Here’s the recipe I worked from: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/ultimate-lemon-meringue-pie – it didn’t go so well last week and I was dubious, but this week I bought a hand mixer and better sugar, and it all went lot better.

Yeah, no, I didn’t eat all that myself, we both had some, and then I sent off a big slice with Smalls so she could get some dessert out of it. I still have some! Sadly, the number of you that are ever going to get to taste this stuff is vanishingly small, and you already know who you are…

By the way, this is all somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It did go well, and it does taste great, but I’m no match for even the most modestly skilled baker. I’m learning and following instructions meant for idiots. I’m just pleased that I didn’t kill anyone.