mothers' day 2012

pink cake

I made my first ever pink cake, for the boys' cousin Abby, who turned 4 this weekend.  Her mum's just given birth to another little girl, and together with Abby and little brother Jack, she had her hands full but couldn't not throw a birthday party for the little girl who loves pink.  So I volunteered to make the cake, because lord knows I might never get the chance to make pink one for my own children.

It was pretty much great.  Even if I do say so.  A little sweet maybe, but it was a birthday cake!  The pink frosting was a normal buttercream frosting, pinked up with pureed raspberries.  And for the cake itself, I followed a recipe I found online, modifying it slightly and adding 1/2 cup of hundreds and thousands, which in the baked cake left little speckles of pink throughout.  I kept the decoration simple (I always do - I can't use a piping bag and I'm really not that inventive), a few silver cachous sprinkled on top and some white ribbon and twine around the sides.  It was a winner - we thought it looked and tasted great.  The cake batter itself is a recipe I'm going to use again.  It's the first I've ever baked using just egg whites, and it was delicious.  It actually tasted like birthday.  Here is the recipe, adapted slightly from Sweetapolita, a blog that has more recipes for a simple butter cake than you could imagine.

White vanilla cake (enough for two 8" or 9" layers)

Ingredients

1 cup whole milk (240 ml at room temperature

6 large egg whites (175 grams), at room temperature (I only needed 5 for 175 grams)

2 1/4 teaspoons (11.25 ml) pure vanilla extract

2 3/4 cups (315 g) plain flour, sifted

1 1/2 cups sugar (300 grams) (I really think you could get away with much less)

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon baking powder (20g)

3/4 teaspoon salt (5 grams)

170 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature and cut into cubes

~1/2 cup hundreds and thousands or whatever you like or nothing at all

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°c. Grease and line  two round 8 or 9 inch pans.

2. Combine and stir the egg whites, 1/4 cup of milk and vanilla in a jug. Set aside.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the dry ingredients, including the sugar, together on low speed for a minute or so.

4. Add the butter and blend on low speed for about 30 seconds, then add remaining 3/4 cup of milk, and mix on low speed until just moistened. Increase to medium speed and mix for 1 1/2 minutes.

5. Scrape the sides of the bowl and begin to add the egg/milk mixture in 3 separate batches; beat on medium speed for 20 seconds after each addition. Gently stir in the hundreds and thousands, until just combined.

6. Divide the batter into the two tins.

7. Bake 25-35 minutes or until a cake tester comes clean when inserted into the center. Start checking the cakes at 20 minutes and then every couple of minutes. 

8. Apparently, you can wrap tightly and store at room temperature for up to 2 days, refrigerator for up to 5 days, or frozen for up to 2 months. 

Raspberry frosting (way loads - 3/4 of the quantity below would be enough to sandwich, crumb coat and cover a two layer 9" cake)

Ingredients

375 g unsalted butter, softened

500 g icing sugar (I used the soft icing mix stuff you get here in Australia)

1 tablespoon (15 ml) milk 

1 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

3 tablespoons raspberry puree made from frozen raspberries

1. Whip butter for 8 minutes on medium speed (I used my KitchenAid on setting 4) until it is pale and creamy.

2. Add remaining ingredients, except puree, and mix on low speed for 1 minute, then on medium speed for 6 minutes. Frosting will be very light, creamy, and fluffy.

3. Add raspberry puree and beat until incorporated.

you feel better

You leave work early because what should be a manageable head cold has left you feeling rotten, with that sort of headache, sneezing and snottiness that won't go away, leaving you completely devoid of energy.

You make it home, get into a hot shower, your most comfortable clothes and feel thankful that your husband is going to pick up the kids and feed them while you lie in bed.  They come home, the boys adorably sweet with their concern for you, even if it only lasts seconds before they are causing chaos.  Realising you can't possibly rest with the racket, you get up, and that's where the restoration begins.

You take the half eaten roast chicken from Sunday night, strip it of any meat - could be a bit or a lot, put the carcass in a pot with some water, a carrot, an onion, simmer for 30 mins.  Mean time, fry some finely diced onion, carrot, parsley and garlic in some butter and a little oil.  Add a splash of marsala or sherry or vermouth, scrape up the goodness from the bottom of the pan before straining the broth into the vegetables and throwing in some thyme, bay and the shredded chicken.  Season well and let it simmer for a while.  You chop up some tarragon and add to the pan with some frozen peas.

You make up some dumpling batter - 1 cup of flour, 1/2 milk, 20 grams butter (melted by putting it in the milk and microwaving for 40-50 seconds), salt, baking powder (about a level tsp).  Mix the milk into the dry ingredients with a spoon, the dough should be wet and gooey.  Drop teaspoonfuls of it into the soup, you'll have about 10 dumplings.  You let it simmer gently, covered for about 15 minutes.  By this time, your husband has fed, bathed and put the kids to bed and the dumplings have doubled in size.  You ladle the soup into bowls.  You eat.  You feel better.  You really do.

tomatoes

This evening, Will and I ate a kilo and a half of tomatoes between us.  That's not counting the sliced tomato we might have had on our lunch time sandwich.  This is how to do it:

Buy way too many tomatoes.  Way too many.  Mainly because you can't be bothered working out the weight of 6-7 tomatoes, so you end up specifying "2kg" or something ridiculous on your online shop.  It was a gamble, yes, because tomatoes especially, you want them red and ripe and you want to smell those stems and the people that are employed by our supermarkets to pack my groceries in particular aren't exactly good at picking.  But the last couple of weeks have been kind of busy and I haven't the time to meander through the markets, so online supermarket shopping (the worst kind?) has been a saviour of sorts.  Anyway, the gamble paid off and the toms we got were good.  End of summer ripe and fragrant and good.

Next?  Let your husband unpack the shopping so that he has the opportunity to say comedic things like "you've bought enough tomatoes for our very own version of that Spanish tomato tossing festival".  Go straight to Deb Perelman, because you know she'll have a recipe that involves tomatoes.  And how.  She has this one.  It's a roasted tomato and 'broiled cheddar' soup.  Now I don't know about you, but the word 'broiled' evokes some weird cooking method that may or may not involve a cauldron.  What she is of course referring to is grilled cheddar.  I'm not sure about broiled cheddar but you could put grilled cheddar with most anything and it would be good.  I was sold.

So this afternoon, I did the easiest possible thing you could do with that many tomatoes, made this amazing roasted tomato soup (with extra roasted garlic) and ate every last bit of it.  So keen were we to devour the smells that had been emanating our kitchen, I forgot to photograph the finished soup, complete with its sourdough grilled cheese topper. Even the kids liked their cheesy spelt sourdough toasts although they weren't exactly hungry after eating most of the bread before I'd even sliced it up for dinner.  And now here we are, the other side of another recipe we'd never tried before, better for it and lycopened up to the hilt.  Ready for some leftover plum almond tart.  With cream.

plum almond tart

This is the recipe, but I've replicated it here with metric measurements.  Changes:  I doubled the frangipane filling because the pastry quantity was enough to do a big tart and a couple of little ones.  I didn't glaze the plums with red current jelly; the stuff I had was a little on the old side and I decided not to use it.  I did however use a black raspberry liqueur in the frangipane that's probably as old as the redcurrant jelly, but a little sip confirmed it tasted just fine.

This was good.  A little on the sweet side but some whipped cream helped with that.  I would have liked to have had some of those spectacular blood red plums but we are at the end (or even past) the stone fruit season, so I used what I could find.  They were good, not terribly juicy but then when you've added sweet, short pastry, frangipane and whipped vanilla cream, who cares.

Ingredients

Pastry:

150g plain flour

1 tablespoon sugar


a pinch of salt


110g chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces


2 tablespoons iced water


1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract


Filling:

50g whole or ground almonds

75g raw caster sugar


1 large egg


45g unsalted butter, room temperature


4 teaspoons framboise (raspberry liqueur) 


400-500g ripe plums, pitted, cut into thick wedges (8-9 per plum)


Method:

See if your husband doesn't mind taking care of dinner proper (he didn't) before preheating the oven to 180°c. Make pastry by combining the cold butter, flour, sugar and salt in a food processor until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs.  Mix together the water and vanilla, add to the processor and process until the dough comes together in big lumps.  You may need more water (I did).  Gather dough into ball and roll out on floured surface. Transfer to 9-inch-diameter tart pan with removable bottom. Trim overhang to 1/2 inch. Using fork, pierce dough all over. Freeze for 15 minutes.

Bake crust until pale golden, about 20 minutes before cooling.

If using whole almonds, grind almonds with sugar in processor. Add egg, butter and 2 teaspoons framboise. Process until batter forms. Spread filling into cooled crust. Arrange plums in the filling. Bake until plums are tender and filling is golden and set, about 50 minutes.

Cool tart. Serve at room temperature with whipped cream, although it would be nice warm too.

sad and complicated

This evening, when I was reading to the boys before bed time, Ollie said to me, 'Mum, I feel sad.  And complicated.'  It was easy to see how this was a funny thing for a three year old to say, but we talked about it for a bit.  He was feeling sad, because I had forbidden any tv this evening, and though he couldn't quite tell me why he was feeling complicated, I'm guessing it was because he was so exhausted this evening, he couldn't possibly have been thinking straight.

What struck me though, was that lately, I've been feeling a bit sad and complicated.  I think it's probably post birthday blues, or the pressure of my work life, or feeling tired and achey regardless of how much sleep I get.  I mean, I'm also quite happy and generally as content as I've ever been but I'm a bit sad too.  See?  It's quite complicated.  I don't have much to be sad about, life is ticking along nicely, we have plenty to anticipate and the kids seem... manageable.  Enjoyable, even.  But there's something and I think it's that feeling of belonging (or lack thereof) that's creeping back into my life, making me question where we want to be as a family.

So anyway, I have made this post all about me, but really, it's all about my children.  They are far better at articulating themselves than I often give them credit for.  It's easy to brush off some of the things that kid says, but much as he couldn't quite tell me what he meant, I'm pretty sure that sad and complicated is just how he was feeling at that moment in time and credit to him for knowing just how to tell me about it.  I hope he realises that happy or sad, I will always want to know how he's feeling.  Even when he's all grown up and life really is complicated.

bunk

Part of the two days off we had last week involved a trip to IKEA.  Yes, we do like to punish ourselves sometimes.  But it was surprisingly pleasant walking around IKEA, childless, with an aim and a little extra time to wonder whether we needed more kitchen ware or tea lights.  And what was the aim?  To purchase the the MYDAL bunk bed for the boys.  I've had my eye on it for a while, nothing else has really compared either for style or price, and since this purchase would also mean new mattresses, duvets and sheets, we needed to be sensible about how much we had to spend.

So we bought the boys their first bunk bed.  We got it home in our Corolla wagon (just - it was comical how scrunched up we were in the front of the car with the bed, mattresses etc in the back), and then we painted it.

This is the colour - Gunnard (Taubmans).  I love it.  I love grey, actually, and I'm increasingly finding it's my go-to colour. The reason for the grey on the bunk bed was so that it would match most of what's in the room.  White was the other obvious choice but our house is fairly white as it is and I liked the idea of the grey against the quilts I made for the boys and the rest of the colour in their room.  As a result, it looks great!  I'm so pleased with it.  And as a bonus, it feels and smells a bit less IKEA-y than it would have if we'd left it with that ghastly natural pine look.

But most importantly, the bunk seems to be a success with the boys, though that I think is due in part to the talking up we've done of it over the last couple of months.  We've taken Max out of his cot and he's now in the bottom bed, and the biggest problems for him are (a) he wants the top bunk and (b) when he does accept he's sleeping in the bottom, he cannot stop himself from getting up and goofing around, much to his brother's delight.  These photos do not even get close to depicting how much joy he's getting out of maximising the cheek involved with bed time now.  Last night (night two - the first night Max did actually decide he wanted to sleep in his new bed), we spent about 90 minutes listening to toys being thrown around, fits of giggles, boys jumping on the top bunk, then a slightly smaller boy jumping on his brother... it went on, but they did it and managed their first night in the bunk bed.  And as I'm writing this, Ollie is squirming around in the top while Max is sound asleep.

It's the start of a level of shenanigans we haven't really had before.  Max is always a little cheeky when we put him to bed, but Ollie is generally a good boy.  Now that they are both out of their cots, it's given them (ie Max) a level of freedom that means Trouble.  But, much as it was annoying that they took until 9pm to go to sleep last night, they went to bed happy (and only really got yelled at a couple of times) and it's reinforced that they really do like sharing their space with each other.

Speaking of spaces, it could be nesting, but it might just be normal-everyday-have-to-organise-it-now!-me, we are starting on the baby's room, which has been a spare room for the last few months and is now beginning to look like a nursery.  Will dismantled Max's cot to go in there this morning and I went through all the many clothes we have to pick out the ones that I will eventually wash and fold neatly in anticipation of that day we bring this new life back from the hospital.  Softly, gently, aching with love and that feeling that the world has just started again for us.  God willing, it will be that way.

birthday

36 years old today.  Never quite thought I'd be this content to be 36.  It sounds so old when you are in your late teens and even your twenties, but here we are, closer to 40 than 30, busier than ever, with more to look forward to, but not so busy that we couldn't take the day off today to enjoy a very nice long lunch.  Happy birthday me.

first trip to the pictures

Our boys don't watch a lot of tv.  They would if we let it happen, but we don't  and they generally watch about fifteen minutes of Thomas/Octonauts/Pingu after bath time.  Sometimes a PlaySchool when it's been a rainy day and they need some entertainment while I cook dinner.  We've tried to watch a movie with Ollie (Cars) but I think we got about ten minutes into it before the chaos and noise of the over the top animation got to Ollie and he decided he didn't want to watch it.  It wasn't a surprise really, we've managed The Jungle Book and we are also fans of The Gruffalo, but these are sweet, gentle animations.  He's been known to watch Bob the Builder from behind a cushion, so he's not the kind of kid that likes to contemplate anything too stressful.

We'd been thinking about whether it was time to take the boys out to the movies.  The Lorax, we were told by our parent friends, is great!  The kids will love it!  They'll have a great time!  It's such an awesome movie!  OK.  So, we decided to take the plunge and take our boys to the pictures for the very first time to see said movie, despite what now seems to be the obvious indications that maybe we should have waited a while.

I thought it would be fairly tame.  I thought the animation would be gentle, cute, Dr Seuss animation.  I didn't think about it from the perspective of a three year old, and definitely not from the perspective of my boy, who's always been a little sensitive and never really enjoyed anything that might result in overstimulation.  The movie was actually great, but it was loud, full of references that we as adults can process and understand (the music, the images of thunder and lightning, the kid going to find the Onceler in the dark) but that a three year old would reasonably find really quite scary.  Ollie tried his hardest but even with the help of his little comforter and sitting on my lap didn't help, and he seemed positively relieved to say yes when I asked if he wanted to leave.

Max on the other hand, seemed to be ok.  Maybe it's because he was snug on his dad's lap, or maybe he was too young to question what he was watching, although there was a moment when he squeaked a little and needed to be comforted, but on the whole, I think he could have handled it.  But we didn't stay the course.  We left after about twenty minutes, did some shopping, ate our many packed snacks anyway and talked to Ollie about what he didn't like.  Turns out it was the previews.

two!

And that was the weekend that Max turned two and we had every ingredient for a fantastic stripey birthday celebration in our garden.  Superb.