cake

Today I have to bake a cake.

It's my son Fecklet's* birthday this weekend, and like the very popular and utterly spoilt rotten kid he is, he's having not one but two parties, which means he needs two cakes. Today I'm making a chocolate sheet cake with chocolate icing, and Saturday I'm making vanilla cupcakes with jam.

I have done a lot of cake baking since becoming a mum, and especially over the last two years since Fecklet has started school. It seems that cake is required for nearly every school occasion, and last summer I won second prize in the PTA Bake-Off with my Earl Grey cupcakes with lemon buttercream, which was to be honest one of the greatest achievements of my LIFE, so I now find that I have a bit of a reputation to uphold as a baker.

Even so, I'm beginning to think it's become an obsession. When I look back over my Twitter feed and my Facebook profile, I don't see photos of parties or shoes or my kid: I see pictures of cakes that I have made. Lots and lots of cakes.

only second prize. I was robbed

whoopie pies (Maine style)

my Extremely Pink birthday cake

I even coloured this sugar myself. such a nerd

cupcakes for girly weekend

obsessed! I am obsessed!!

(It's really no wonder that I've also had to take up running.)

Anyway at this point you are probably thinking I'm going to discuss how baking a cake is like writing a book. But you know what? Baking a cake is NOTHING like writing a book. When you bake a cake, you have a recipe. You follow it. And then you have something nice to eat. The whole process takes a couple of hours and is quite relaxing.

When you write a book, there is no recipe. You take horrendous chances and a lot of the time you are terrified. You spend a year of your life on it, pouring blood onto the page, and at the end, you may or may not have something that you ever want to show anyone. It's very hard work and is not relaxing in the slightest and you don't even have any cake to eat at the end. Instead you have to proofread it.

I'm pretty thankful I don't have to write two books for Fecklet's birthday. Cake baking is way easier.

*His real name isn't Fecklet. I'm not that weird.

Birthday Bash

April is a fine month for writerly birthdays.


Susanna found that a quick google for famous Aries writers gives us: Maya Angelou (4 April 1928), Robert Frost (26 March 1874), Nick Hornby (17 April 1957), Washington Irving (3 April 1783), Henry James (15 April 1843), Barbara Kingsolver (8 April 1955), Louis L’Amour (22 March 1908), Flannery O’Connor (25 March 1925), Eudora Welty (13 April 1909), Tennessee Williams (26 March 1911), William Wordsworth (7 April 1770), and Emile Zola (2 April 1840).

Which, all in all, means that Julie, Liz and yours truly are in very good company... Yes, this week it's our birthday! So we thought we'd continue the party and share our favourite birthday (or any time!) cakes with you!

Julie's cake is pictured above - a cake she made herself, on a dish given by Brigid - and the recipe can be found here (I'm drooling already).

Liz sent a picture of her cake from Dubai, complete with smurfs - it's a cheesecake made with fake sugar and thus low carb!

Christina is sharing her recipe for Easter Cake:

Whisk together 2 eggs, 200 grams of caster sugar, 200 grams plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and 100 millilitres of water.

Grease a 9 inch cake tin and shake some breadcrumbs over the surface so the cake won't stick to it. Add the cake mix and bake in a 175 degree Celsius (340 Fahrenheit) oven for 25-30 minutes.

Icing - put 1 egg yolk, 75 grams butter, 100 grams caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of vanilla sugar into a saucepan and bring to the boil while stirring. Pour this over the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven, then leave to cool for a little while. Eat while still warm though!

My cake's a classic Victoria Spoge (gluten free, naturally) oozing with raspberry jam and whipped cream... mmmmmmm.....

There's a good recipe here, but I prefer using half and half Orgran self raising GF flour and Dove's Farm.

Brigid said she'd selflessly provide the drinks for our little cakes party.... "How about some Twinkles?

Per cocktail:

30ml vodka

15ml elderflower cordial

Champagne

1. Pour vodka and elderflower cordial in cocktail shaker and add ice cubes

2. Shake (a la Tom Cruise) then strain mixture into chilled martini glass or glass filled with ice

3. Top drink with champagne and add a twist of lemon.

Chin chin!

And a Happy *hic* Birthday :-) "

Happy Birthday, April writers!

Favourite Things

I don't know if Julie knows that I sometimes have a hard time thinking up something to blog about (probably because I'm usually posting on a Sunday, when I'm all wound-down and empty-brained) or if she just thinks of me whenever she makes a cake. Which is by no means unreasonable.

Either way, she's quite right, I do have a Fine Appreciation of Cake. It's been dented in recent years by my wheat-free status, but that's okay - it's just reinforced my pavlova obsession.

And believe it or not, thinking about cake did actually bring me to a topic for this blog about characters and making them real.

Via cake stands and aprons.

Yes, cake stands and aprons. I have, at the most recent count, seven cake stands and nine aprons. I like them. I like to look at them, and I like to use them. They are pretty, practical and two of my very favourite things.

So, what are my heroines' favourite things? Those things that make them double-take on the high street, go ooooooh at a picture in a magazine, and beg on their birthday?

Thinking about heroines in my published and unpublished manuscripts, I mostly drew a blank. Countryside Ranger Jenny has a thing for trees, it's true, but it's subtle, and not of the common or garden birthday-present variety. Mari, growing up as sole carer for her ailing father, hasn't had much opportunity to even KNOW what she likes, a fact she acknowledges herself. Shiftless thief Lisa's two favourite things are pretty much her only possessions - her boat and an item of her mother's jewelry. And she abandons them both the instant she realises owning the boat has made her an unwilling accessory to murder. Another heroine has everything money can buy, but nobody's ever asked her what she actually wants. Another has been busy being a Mum since she was sixteen, and is only ten years later starting to think about what she wants out of life - even her three children have their favourite things, but she doesn't.

Now, I THINK this is because I tend to write heroines who are out of their depth and suffering, for whom favourite things are just not important. I HOPE this isn't because I write shallow characters, because I actually think little details like cake stands and aprons give a character depth. Especially when the character who covets them also has, say, chainsaw certification and dirt under their fingernails.

But I'll be thinking about this again when I'm editing the current WIP.

How about your (and your characters') favourite things? What springs to mind?

(And for the curious, the cake stand pictured is one I received from my lovely in-laws for my birthday last month, and the apron is a red version of the green one Biddy (who has impeccable taste) gave me some years back. Mmmmmm.....)

Pop back on Thursday for Christina's next post!

Cakes and Novels

I've been making cakes all week for the street party we're having in our neighbourhood for the royal wedding tomorrow. I've also been working on my next book; I'm about 20,000 words in. Baking is a nice break from writing; it's satisfying and creative and of course you have a cake at the end of it. So I've been thinking about the ways that the two activities are similar, and different.

Why Baking A Cake Is Like Writing A Novel

• It's quite a precise process. You have to concentrate. If you mess up or forget an ingredient or make an unwise substitution, the whole thing can turn out to be a sticky horrible mess, or possibly make someone vomit.

• It's creative. After you've finished and it comes out well, you feel an enormous sense of pride.

• A cake and a novel aren't quite complete until someone else enjoys them.

• At some point, magic happens. A wet, shapeless batter rises, takes form, and becomes something wonderful.

• You should always wait for a cake and a novel to cool down before you ice/revise them.

• While you're baking or writing, your house will most likely be a complete mess.

• They both require lots of butter. What? You say you don't need butter to write a novel? Have I been doing it wrong all these years? I mean, no, of course not. You don't need butter to write a novel. How silly of me. *hides butter under desk*

Why Baking A Cake Is Not Like Writing A Novel

• If you muck up your novel, you can go back and fix it afterwards. With cakes, you're sort of stuck with the horrible sticky mess, unless you're good at emergency buttercream fixes.

• Baking a cake, you have to follow a recipe, or at least a basic process, quite strictly because there's a science to it. You can improvise, but if you leave out the baking powder, you're in trouble. With writing a novel, every once in a while, you can break the rules.

• You can bake a cake with a hangover.

• You can let your children help you bake a cake, whereas if you let them help you write your novel, it will consist entirely of explosions, aliens and princesses in tiaras.

• A cake tastes good at almost every stage of its process. But you wouldn't want to lick the bowl of the first draft of my novels. They are really, really crap before they're finished.

• Novels have a lot fewer calories than cakes. In theory. I've never eaten a novel, so I'm not 100% sure (though I do seem to consume a lot of chocolate while I'm writing one). But cakes and novels are both very nice with a cup of tea.

Any other ideas?

(Come back on Sunday to hear from Anna, who has A Fine Appreciation of Cakes.)