Songs, skirts and scones

Hmm, Paul is away today all day. Is this a good excuse to bake something sweet, as he won’t be here to be tempted by it? Let me sit and ponder on that for a while, euh….. YES!

After having shivered by the ripe banana that ended up in my breakfast (my bananas need to have just a shimmer of green left on the edges, that’s how I like them best. Any brown, or even properly ripened bananas make me shiver in disgust.) I remember a colleague way back in my student days when I worked at the University telephone exchange, who would keep an already ripe banana in her drawer until it was black. Black! I sat next to her, so you can imagine the smell would have made me gag…

Anyway, on the hunt for a banana bread recipe I was flicking through my baking books and found several recipes. More than I could have imagined actually, but they all required more ingredients than I have available at the moment. Then I remembered the recipe book that the parents’ council of the girls’ primary school compiled last year (me editing and typing, Paul designing), which should have a banana bread in its contents. Ah, even better, it’s a banana and chocolate bread.

I was so happy that I could use the four really brown bananas, mashing them with the blender, nose pinched. When I turned round to get the eggs, I had an ‘accident at work’: the blender would usually stay upright in the bowl, especially when it is standing in a gooey substance, but not this time. Our Tjabering was in the line of fire and was so astounding he didn’t even try to lick the banana from his nose (and lip, and t-shirt, and floor).

The baking was on the basis of the bread baking until a skewer comes out clean. Well, 20 minutes, 30  minutes, less, more? What temperature? Mmm, let’s try at 180C. After 20 minutes top was still liquid, so I added another 10 minutes, and another 10, and a piece of greaseproof paper to prevent the top from blacking, and another 5 minutes. Ready!

Sweet, sticky, warm banana bread with a hint of chocolate (using the Dutch chocolate sprinkles, as I didn’t have any chips), edible without butter, just as it comes. One slice was definitely not enough for anyone and after half a loaf was gone within 15 minutes, I hid the rest!

While the taste buds still are trying to resist to eat more than just one (or two, or three) oat cookies, and while oven is still warm, I scour through our newly purchased Tassajara Bread Book. Mjum, mjum and mjum. We have been long the proud owners of the Tassajara Cook Book and Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, both by Edward Espe Brown. Both books are great for general inspiration for simple and honest cooking, and for inspiration for life in general. The Tassajara Bread Book was on my wish list for a while now, and now, since the weight loss battle has seriously begun,  the breads and other more hearty baked goods from the book were too good to resist. Paul bought it last week, and it has been on my night stand for a few nights.

After having baked the oat cookies this morning I only had one hour til lunchtime. As it turned out, I did not have all the ingredients for any of the quick breads from The Tassajara Bread Book (I would have had to convert all the measurements as well, which always take me quite. a. long. time.). I resorted to a regular soda bread. Rather than bake a loaf, I put the dough in muffin cases for 12 individual soda buns and baked them for about 20 minutes. They had a lovely golden top, sounded hollow *tap tap* and smelled and tasted really nice and warm. It was such a pretty sight and it made me wish for guests to offer them an abundance of these little buns, juices, cold meats, nice jams, fresh cheeses and, well, you get my drift.

This time though we managed five between Paul, Tjabering and myself; the girls shared one for their after school snack (although Kathrijn could probably have managed a whole one. She is a right bread monster!) and we had some with our diner as well, when the naan with Paul’s Rogan Josh was very quickly finished. Good baking day, madame.

After a week of very little baking, sewing or indeed singing, today I woke up rearing to go baking!!! Cookies, bread, whatever! After a nice invigorating walk from the school and hanging up three quarters of our wardrobe up to dry, the timing of Lovely Lucy from Attic 24 couldn’t have been better: a oat cookies recipe!! Very simple recipe, very quick baking time, very very yummy cookies.

Unfortunately for Tjabering they were very hot coming out of the oven, so he had to wait…

… and wait until the raisins had cooled down enough to be eaten without blistering his mouth. O, but the wait was good, wasn’t it, wee man? The girls were surprisingly less taken by them, Kathrijn even dared to peel out all the raisins! Ah well, too bad, I’ll have to eat them all, *cackle cackle*.

Happy first day of spring! And what a lovely first day of spring it was! Blue skies, very nice temperature (in the afternoon the children even splashed around in spilled water on the warm tarmac of the parking lot in their bare feet.), infectious cheers of the children and their lovely little friends, who were visiting with their mum. As we knew they were coming today I had asked the girls yesterday what I would bake. Of course the answer was: ‘chocolate cake’, which to me translates as ‘anything with chocolate, please!’.

So, this morning, while the breadmaker was slaving away on an extra large linseed bread for lunch, I made some coconut chocolate bars from Bake. Easy recipe, quickly mixed and baked. Butter, sugar, cocoa powder and coconut are the main ingredients and they make a dryish but yet succulent bar. After mixing just the sugar, butter and coconut it was difficult not to keep tasting. Just look at that picture above! After the cake had cooled down and had been added the layer of chocolate, it looked just like the picture in the book. Well done, myself *pat pat on the back*. I do wish that I had pressed the dough even harder into the tin, because it was incredibly crumbly (the house looked like something out of a fairytale: crumb trails everywhere! But, recommendable.

This saturday morning my sleep in was well deserved: Tjabering sleeps in an open bed now ánd has an earache, so he spent a lot of time calling for me and spending time next to me in bed. At 10.30 (!!!) I woke up sleepily. During breakfast I realised that any bread baking would have to be non-yeast based, otherwise it would never be finished by lunchtime. Sweet baking would have to wait or be cancelled, since we both came to a harsh realisation that our obesity is going to affect our health and future more than we would like to have admitted before. And, as we do know: ‘as long as we don’t have/buy it, we won’t eat it’ or rather ‘if it is there, we will eat it, pronto’, I need to cut down on sweet baking. But, as I don’t want to stop baking all together, baking bread would be the next best thing.

As I still had some buttermilk left from the cornbread, I decided to bake a soda bread. Soda bread is that lovely soft, slightly sweet bread with an crispy crust. When we still lived in the Netherlands and went on trips to Ireland, it was one of those holidays foods that made the holiday.

Lacking the required wholemeal flour I risked adding spelt flour and stuck to the normal recipe.

• 125 grams spelt flour
• 325 grams strong bread flour
• 1,5 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
• 45 grams of butter
• 1 tablespoon caster sugar
• 290 ml buttermilk

Make sure the oven is preheated to 190C before you start mixing the ingredients. Sift the flours, salt, bicarbonate of soda together, add any leftovers from the sift and the sugar and stir well. In a well stir in 290 ml buttermilk to a soft dough.

Knead to a log shape and place in a paper lined loaf tin. Bake for 40 minutes and then turn out into a wire rack. When it has just cooled down a bit, it will cut the easiest. Not too hot, not cooled down completely, but only just.

This morning the loaf was just right for our lunch with left over corn bread, Sainbury’s (WHAT!!?? yes sorry, not everybody likes my bread. Kathrijn loves ‘mummy’s bread’, but Hendrikje like this one better) multi-seeded loaf, soda bread, boiled eggs, baked beans (what do you mean ‘we have integrated right well?!’, haha) and some parsley for the eggs. Of course there was the usual honey, jam, peanut butter and my last boxes of ‘hagelslag’ from the Netherlands. ‘Hagelslag’ covers an assortment of sandwich sprinkles, usually chocolate in all sorts of mixtures and textures, but also anise seed sprinkles, fruit flavoured. When the girls were asked if I needed to bring anything from the Netherlands, they looked puzzled until they realised this also meant food! Hagelslag was the only thing I had to add to my list.

The soda bread tasted very nice indeed, it was baked through, so it didn’t matter that the flour wasn’t as it should be, nor that I didn’t make the round shape with the cross. Quick and easy, nice and tasty!

On the Monday after the concert all the teachers were invited for some food and a session at De Averell House. After some sausage rolls, sandwiches, chicken wings it was good listening to a full session in swing with a grin on my face: here I was, little old Dutch girl, as one of the teachers, listening to these amazing musicians playing tune after tune. This is why we moved here: to be able to sit and listen and then leisurely walk back home!

Quite a few songs were sung and I was the one to start. I chose to sing a song I recorded at a singing session at my very first Joe Mooney Summerschool in 1999. A man sang ‘Little thatched cabin’ , a lovely moving song, which I learned fairly quickly afterwards, but never really started singing. I have dusted it and loved singing it on Monday. It turned out not many at the session had heard it before. One of the teachers was asked if his dad sang it, or perhaps Sarah Ann. Now, you may not know this, but I love the singing of Geordie Hanna (who unfortunately passed away in the late ’80’s). When I heard the combination of ‘dad’ and Sarah Ann [O'Neill], another wonderful singer with the most beautiful songs, the penny dropped. I know she is Geordie Hanna’s sister, I know the teacher’s surname is Hanna, ahum, might he be Geordie Hanna’s son? When I felt brave enough to ask it turned out that indeed he was his son… We spent a pleasant half hour chatting about singing and songs. I went to bed happy!

Here you can hear me sing Little thatched cabin .

Please, also enjoy the singing of Geordie Hanna:

O dearie me, what an afternoon we have had at the Annual Concert of the Armagh Pipers Club! Adreline pumping, nerves fraying: will they remember all the words, will they sing in tune, will our wee ones manage to stay quiet until the end of the concert (babysitter was unavailable), where do we leave Tjabering when I have to go backstage (health and safety suddenly was a lot stricter and we weren’t allowed to have him in the buggy in the room. He was soo tired, poor wee man.) Eventually it all went well, but my goodness, I was tired afterwards: had to go to bed at 21.45!

Hendrikje and Kathrijn had to start of with the toddler singers, singing Johnny when you die and Do you love an apple. It was a hilarious performance: they tried to sang the loudest and Kathrijn and the girl next to her were competing: who could get the closest to the mike hanging slightly over their heads. It was really funny and endearing and set the informal tone of the afternoon. After the girls came of stage I had to do a tour round the theater to try and get us some place to sit, without the buggy. Ended up on the first row, where Tjabering was very keen to get as close as possible to the singers and musicians, standing on my knees and leaning unto the stage. Applauding, pointing and mumming along… Ah, he is such a sweet boy!

All my singing slots were in the second half of the concert and we had to decide what to do with the children. Hendrikje and Kathrijn were lovely in the first half, so I sent them back in the auditorium to sit near the stage, hoping they would remain like that for another one hour and a half…. Wee man went backstage with me in the buggy. Fortunately there were lots of willing girls backstage, keen to ‘get their hands’ on the wee man, so throughout all the performances there was at least one person minding him, teaching him high fives and knuckle touches!

The singing went wonderfully well, some words were forgotten, verses even (my own song!), but I think the singers can be proud of themselves. Alexander turned out quite the conquerer, Willie Taylor was still a nasty piece of work, the sour milk cart left on time, and on board the Kangaroo things are still hunky dory (but wait until you get back to that suburb…).  On to next year’s concert!

And yes, the worst thing of my singing unfortunately can’t be changed: I will always always look like I am giving birth when I sing *sigh* (These are actually the least embarrassing photographs, *double sigh*).

Yes, it exists, this is (or should resemble) a chocolate cake which is ready in 5 minutes. If you can sense danger, look away now! This would mean there are no more excuses against a 11 pm chocolate fix etc etc.

A while ago I landed on Made by Petchy, a blog by Norwegian Solveig Petch who blogs on all things nice. She posted a recipe of a chocolate cake made in cup in 5 minutes by using a microwave… Last Friday I tried it out, and by Jove, it really works! It was difficult to get the cake out in one piece as you can see, ahum. The texture is initially a little odd, but the flavour is really good, so you get used to that. One amount of the recipe is enough for a large helping for one,  a normal helping for two and nice taster portion for me, Paul and Tjabering. Topped with some ice cream or whipping cream, it would probably be even better. It is not good, not good at all…

On Sunday I couldn’t resist making a cake that catches my eye every time I flick through Bake: the upside-down cranberry cake. I used to find cranberries really disgusting, but somehow it grew on me when I had to drink it during my pregnancies against bladder problems. Now I would actually voluntarily drink it and would opt for snacks with cranberries in them. And this cake is soooo tempting: you bake your cake with syrup and cranberries at the bottom of the tin, turn it around on a plate and then let the syrup and juices soak into the cake. Now, does this notion not already make your mouth water without looking at the picture below!?

Officially you should make this in an ovenproof pan, but I used my regular cake tin. This does involve a little juggling when you get to the turning stage (and some cursing in my case…), but it does work.

When baked I did as suggested: Put a large enough plate over the tin, turn tin and plate in one go and let the cake sink unto the plate. You just need to make sure that your oven mittens do NOT get stuck between the plate and tin when doing this, because you’ll end up with cake on your work surface and NOT on the plate, grmlb.

Eaten warm,  a totally sumptuous, moist, sticky, perfectly sweet and sour cake….

On Saturday the four senior singers of the Pipers Club were coming round to our house for a last practice before the annual concert on Sunday. A quote from my email confirming the time: If you promise to practice, I’ll promise to make a cake. There was no way around it, I HAD to make a cake, I promised *wink*. I opted for an iced orange cake this week. Well, mandarin cake, because I had no oranges in stock, but mandarins aplenty. The recipe is from Rachel Allen’s Bake.

She uses icing, made by mixing orange juice and icing sugar until soft but not runny. I made the icing according to the recipe, but I didn’t like this icing at all, far to sweet and sugary. Instead I made a simple cream cheese/butter icing with a little mandarin rind: mix together 75 grams cream cheese, 25 grams soft butter, 75 grams icing sugar and rind of one mandarine. Mmmm.

The singers were plied with tea and cake, and I am happy so say it took a while to get the singing started! Kathrijn wanted to stay and listen (and yes, if she could get a piece of cake, that would be nice.) I stole a little bit from her, and I have found a new favorite for my list. Soft, light but at the same time sticky cake with lovely fresh icing!!! There were even second helpings, but luckily we had some cake left for tea time for the fives of us.