As if I don’t have enough domestic challenges on my plate my dear husband upped the ante when he decided to start taking a lunch box to work. Now the morning regime includes making up his daily lunchtime feed which consists of savoury and sweet treat. I have almost cracked the sandwich routine but last week I was caught out on the cake supply. Although there were no complaints I was aware that my lunch box chef halo had slipped.
The trick is to bake a cake or cakes that will last for a week or more otherwise you find yourself caught with your proverbial apron strings untied come Thursday. An out of date cake would never do. What we really need is a bigger freezer then such worries would be gone but for now I’ve turned to a tried and tested bake that lasts for ages, is a favourite to eat and I am sure will never go out of fashion.
As I’ve blogged about baking this cake before I decided it was time to get a little more creative with the food photography even if the cake baking was a little more routine. All I can say is that it’s quicker to bake a cake than it is to create a photographic record of the experience but it did give me a chance to try out some of the focus buttons on my new camera.
I recently breached technology etiquette here at Domestic Executive HQ. After years of relying on his Lordship to load up my iPod I’ve set up my own iTunes library, it was like stepping out through a new window on the world. That’s not to say the outlook I already had wasn’t interesting, in truth I’ve listened to interviews, documentaries and programmes that I wouldn’t have picked for myself but nevertheless have enjoyed.
But choosing new podcasts for myself has led me into a a feminist debate I wasn’t even aware was raging. It seems I’m a Femivore, a women who seeks independence, self sufficiency and personal fulfillment by staying at home growing their own food and embrace domesticity as their own brand of feminism. It was a short snippet on The Splendid Table which is an American equivalent of The BBC Food Programme that led me to research more about this new brand of feminism.
So let’s make cake and talk more about femivorism.
One of the things that charmed me about New Zealand before we came to live here was the seasonal nature of food. It seems my fantasy of a fine upstanding country that would not be plagued by globalisation has been broken with the sight of strawberries in the supermarket this week imported from somewhere else in the world. Even if I had been tempted by the prospect the price certainly put me off.
Right now we’re enjoying the fruits of our autumn harvest with Pears plentiful right now. I’d like to say that these are my pears grown in our orchard but alas we are a few years from that so instead we bought some New Zealand organic pears grown locally as the next best thing. Over indulging from the fruit bowl I was inspired to make a Pear and Almond Tart that I spied in one of my back issues of Cuisine Magazine as I was trawling for seasonal recipes to try out this month.
If you’re ever looking for a pick me up I find reaching for some ginger has the desired effect. Home made hot lemon and with a spoon of ginger paste is my standard way to regain my brain after a few coaching calls back to back. It has a reinvigorating effect that a cup of tea or cup of coffee which tends to dull my brain rather than wake it up. So when the temperatures started plummeting here it was of course a ginger cake recipe that I looked for.
Ginger has been a common theme for my baking. I’ve baked ginger muffins, ginger cookies, ginger cake and best of all ginger biscuits so I thought it was only right to try and new ginger baking variation in the form of a ginger loaf.
I never thought that my New Zealand baking odyssey this year would also be a lesson history. One of our recent baking exploits took us back to the Boer War and the Siege of Ladysmith to be precise. Under siege for 118 days when food became scarce it’s hardly surprising that a good celebration was required when it was all over. The Ladysmith Cake was concocted as a result.
When I first read the recipe – vanilla cake split in two one half spiced and then sandwiched with plain by a layer of jam – I was a little suspicious of how this might actually turn out.
On damp weekends in the UK on occasion we used to take comfort in one of our favourite home stores. Not only could I salivate over tiles, paints and bathrooms I could dream about owning the Rolls Royce of cookers – an Aga. I fantasised about baking bread, cakes and casseroles. I have to confess that when we were building our house here in New Zealand I had mailed over a copy of the Fired Earth catalogue and lugged around paint stores, tiles shops and bathroom shops pointing at the pictures and saying “I want something like that!”. Remarkably many of the retailers took pity on me and consoled me with the next best thing available in the southern hemisphere.
I admit we did contemplate an Aga when I tracked down the New Zealand distributor but common sense got the better of me in our determination to keep the building budget on track. I feel that one day I may yet become an Aga owner but for the time being I love my Aga cousin a Rangemaster Range which is no compromise I can assure you. It’s an old friend these days as I flex my domestic executive muscle.
Somehow though I’ve always felt a bit of a domestic fraud. With amazing kit to cook and bake with and more time than ever to experiment I’ve still failed to bake bread in the traditional artisan way. Using the breadmaker seems such a cop out but when you get great bread with little effort I’ve never had the compulsion to go the extra mile and bake bread with my own hands. Until now.
Many of my holiday memories revolve around food. What I ate and drank where linger longer for me that some of the sights we saw. Sometimes it’s the sheer pleasure of dining at leisure or sampling a local delight. A few weeks ago we ventured to replicate one of hour holiday memories inspired by our trust Treasury of New Zealand Baking. For a short while we stepped back into Siena and remembered the magic of this ancient city and its most delicious Panforte.
This confection is normally served with coffee but it works well with tea as an afternoon snack. It’s most certainly the sugar laden pick me up you need to keep up the levels of concentration during a day of back to back coaching calls.
With the wind howling around the verandas and the rain lashing down it’s hard to remember when the sun beat down on the kitchen garden. Even when we didn’t get much sun this summer I would pick those days over what winter is starting to throw at us right now. Even if I did end up with an over supply of green tomatoes.
Back in the warmer days of Spring, I threw caution to the wind and was a little enthusiastic in my propagation of courgette plants. Seemed a shame to waste them although at that time I didn’t quite appreciate the sheer productivity of this plants. My final fling to use my courgette harvest was the perfect match for my green tomatoes to produce a seasonal chutney using a recipe from The River Cottage Preserves Handbook.
Friday nights in the UK used to be an enormous sigh of relief. That time when you could shrug off the working week, wander over to the local pub flop with a drink whilst they rustled up the best fish and chips you could buy. The last few Fridays have felt a little like this with the exception that there is no local pub to wander too and I make home made pizza instead of fish and chips. The other good thing about Friday’s now is that it’s the day I can plan what we might bake at the weekend.
MT made a ginormous cake a couple of weeks ago and it’s still going strong for his lunch box each day. It dawned on me today I’d not blogged about it. In fact, I’ve not blogged much at all this week. A combination of cold, dark nights and not enough brainpower. Work has continued at full on pace but there is light at the end of the tunnel now as I shift a gear into a new home based project next month.
Every two months our food pornography arrives in the mail. Packed full recipes it’s always an inspiration for catering to come. I’ve been collecting these since we came to New Zealand and after four years have amassed quite stash. I like to pull out the back copies for the month we’re in to get ideas to keep me on my culinary toes. The recipes are solid, no nonsense affairs and so far have been a resounding success every time.
Although the number of pages has been reduced in recent months as the level of advertising has dropped one thing that has stayed in the quality of features and number of recipes. It would be a dull month in our kitchen with our Cuisine magazine missing.
