In case you’re wondering ….

a) No of course I can’t afford them
and
b) Yes it is completely immoral to spend enough to feed a family of four for two months, on a pair of shoes.

However, they are currently on my feet.  A year of buying no new clothes, never having a takeaway coffee or going out for drinks, worrying every time you spend anything because you’re saving for your wedding, will do that to a girl – or this one, anyway.  (Alternative explanations may be found under the headings Pink stilletos will not be the answer to your identity crisis, but they may solve your wardrobe’s and If it is still cold enough to snow in March and you have baked enough cake to fuel a sumo army, try shoes).

Now I just need somewhere to wear them.  I thought they’d be satisfied with dinner and my upcoming hen do, but they’ve whispered that actually what they’d really like is to see this, possibly followed by drinks here.

Anyone fancy coming with me?

Chocolate sheet cake

If one day you find yourself walking down the street feeling so miserable you could cry, and on further investigation realise that there is actually nothing wrong at all except that it is February, there are worse things you could do than go home and bake a cake.  If the recipe happens to be one which was passed on from your dad’s cousin to your mum before becoming part of family folklore, so much the better.

This is the cake my mum cooked for every birthday, special occasion, school bake sale or wet Sunday afternoon when we were litle.  (She has now replaced it with a more sophisticated and rather delicious bitter chocolate and ground almond torte as her go-to cake recipe.  It is lovely, but lacks the squish factor and nostalgic merit of this cake).  Mum would carve it into shapes with the breadknife for our birthdays, and decorate it with sometimes lurid icing: grass green with tiny horses racing across the top for my sister, or an entire chocolate horse with a saddle drawn in smarties; something pink and ballet-related for me.

It’s called a sheet cake because you’re supposed to bake it in a large rectangular tin.  The one my ma uses is 9″ by 12″ with sides about 1 ½” deep.  I only have round tins, so I used two 9″ tins.  This changes the proportion of cake to icing, because you will end up with a deeper, layer cake, which is worth bearing in mind because the icing is one of the best things about this cake (and one worth adding to your repertoire for making an ordinary sponge more exciting, too).

Please note all measurements (cups, teaspoons (tsp) and tablespoons (tbs)) are British.

Ingredients

Cake:
4 oz butter
1/4 cup oil
1 cup water
4 tbs cocoa
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups self-raising flour
2 beaten eggs
1/2 cup sour milk or yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla essence

Icing:
4 oz butter
4 tbs cocoa
4 tbs milk
12 oz icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

Preheat oven to gas 6 (200°C, 400°F)
Grease and line your tin(s) – a 9″ x 2″ rectangular tin, or two 9″ tin

Place in a saucepan the butter, oil and water, and bring to the boil.  Mix together the beaten eggs, sour milk or yoghurt, and vanilla essence.  Mix dry ingredients, then pour over the hot butter mixture and stir well.  Mix in egg and sour milk mixture, and pour into your tin(s).  Bake for 20 – 25 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.  Leave to cool in tins for 10 mins, then turn out.

To make your icing, add butter, cocoa and milk to a large pan and bring to the boil.  Add icing sugar and vanilla essence, stir well.  Allow to cool until it is soft but not runny, about ten minutes.  Ice cake with a spatula or palette knife, and use a fork to make patterns on the top of your cake, if desired.

(If you use the icing while it is hot, you can pour it on the cake and achieve a smooth, shiny surface (as seen in my photos, because I am impatient), but you risk the top layer sliding off the bottom, and the icing will keep pouring off the sides of your cake and onto the counter-top, leaving you with less icing on your cake.  You have been warned!).

I hope this cheers up your February!  All other tips gratefully received.

The hardest button to button

Or, your advice is sought, please.  As usual, there’s a story to begin with.  Thank you in advance for your wise words and kind consideration.

Deri proposed, in our kitchen, on my birthday last year (at six o’clock in the morning because I was working that weekend), with a button threaded onto an offcut of ribbon left over from Christmas, which he tied onto my finger.  I’d always said I would want to be involved in choosing any ring I was going to wear for such a long time, and truthfully my engagement ring is not one he would have chosen, or the one I would have bought if I’d been shopping on my own, but we both love it and it’s a perfect combination of what we both wanted in a ring, which makes me really happy.

The button he proposed with is one of a pair he bought from The Button Lady in Hampstead, and he wants us each to wear one of the buttons on our wedding day.  His will be part of his buttonhole, and I want to wear mine in my hair.  My dress has a crew neckline and short sleeves, and I’m going to wear my hair (long, thick, dark brown) up, in a bun of some kind.

I would be grateful for your advice on what to do with my button.  On its own, pinned to the side of my head, I think it will get lost, but I don’t want to make it part of a big frothy headpiece in which it would disappear.  It is a very pretty, mauve- white and gold enamel button with a tiny pink-and-red rose in the middle and teensy green leaves, and I would like to echo this, and also the flowers of Deri’s buttonhole, in my hairpiece somehow.  I also want it to be quite simple, because I am not a girl who usually wears very pretty, decorative pieces, and I don’t see why I should morph into a Disney princess just because I’m getting hitched.

The button is about 2 cm in diameter, slightly smaller than a 10p piece, and bigger than a penny.

Do you think Queenie approves?

So, any thoughts?  I am considering using a few more buttons to make a small bouquet, with perhaps the odd fabric-covered button, and some of mother-of-pearl, which we both love.  Obviously I would want my engagement button to be the star piece!  Alternatively, I’ve thought of making the button an accompanying leaf of some kind, perhaps of felt with some little glass beads sewn on – or of course I could just have a buttonhole of my own to match Deri’s, and shove that into my hair.

If you’re wondering what the flowers will be, I don’t know!  My mum arranges flowers better than anyone I know, and has kindly agreed to do ours.  I’ve told her I want lots of foliage – ideally including leaves which smell good, like rosemary and bay – flowers which are in season in June, and an English-garden feel, and other than that she has carte blanche.  I know they will be beautiful.

Thank you so much for any thoughts you might have.  My button and I are really grateful.

Naxian Cheese Coins

My favourite recent charity-shop find is the Two Fat Ladies cookbook.  I never saw these two on TV (although since buying the book I have watched all the YouTube clips I can find), and I am sorry that I didn’t discover them before Jennifer Paterson passed away, because the book is wonderful.  They wrote with such gusto and joie de vivre – about the recipes, the ingredients, their experiences of cooking, their lives – and the food is just what I want to eat at this time of year (in moderation!): luxurious, courageous, robust atheroma-inducing old English comfort food, with a side of no-nonsense brilliance and a hearty sprinkling of colonial eclecticism.

Some friends moved into their new flat over Christmas, and Deri helped carry their stuff and build flat-pack furniture.  When they invited us round last night to toast their new home, and asked us to bring “nibbles,” the least I could do was bake something.  But nibbles are savoury, aren’t they?  Oh dear.  I can only bake cakes.

Luckily, I’d been wanting to try this recipe of Jennifer Paterson’s for a while.  How could you resist something reputed to be “perfectly splendid with a good cocktail”?

They were perfectly splendid with champage, too.  Crispy, crunchy, buttery and cheesy – unsurprisingly, for something made of equal amounts butter, parmesan and flour, flavoured with celery salt, paprika, mustard, and cayenne pepper.  Moreish, too.  We ate them all, sitting around and telling stories.

Mike and Sarah – thank you for having us, thank you for your wonderful friendship, and Happy New Home!

And Jennifer, thank you.

(I would feel bad typing onto the blog a recipe which I have just cooked straight from a book – out of respect, and also for copyright and plagiarism reasons.  Twenty-two years of exams will do that to you.  But I also love sharing recipes, and the community and  heritage which grows from that, and I know lots of people in the blogsphere do it without blinking.  What do you think?).

Happy 30 to me!

Today is my birthday.

This morning I went for a follow-up appointment with the surgeon who did my appendicectomy, and on the way home tried on some extraordinarily expensive shoes which I can’t afford but want to wear to our wedding (oh yes, I haven’t mentioned that, have I?  Today also marks a year since he proposed, brave man).  Tonight I will be going to work, while Deri goes out to celebrate one of our friends’ (not 30th) birthdays.  Yesterday I withdrew from an application for a job I didn’t want, which means I will definitely be unemployed come August, and tomorrow I will be trying to sleep during the day, relying on hot milk with a large slug of Amaretto, a hot water bottle, and not much sleep for the past twenty-four hours.

All of which goes to show that life is what happens while you’re busy leading an ordinary day, and that the big and momentous scoot along quite happily with the unremarkable and the mundane in their sidecar.

Having a birthday so close to Christmas and New Year means that a lot of the big plans and grand gestures have been made recently, without time for a shakedown, so there isn’t much else for me to say here, except to answer the question a few people have asked recently, and I have also been asking myself, “Are you happy to be turning thirty?” to which the answer is definitely “Yes.”  Maybe I’ll explore that a bit more in posts to come.

I also wanted to add a few things to my new year’s resolutions, from my lovely birthday cards:

Cliff Walk in Spring, Nicholas Hely Hutchinson, from my mum

“… and lots of coastal walks”

and from my aunt, textile design by Josef Hillerbrand for Edinburgh Weavers, 1933

“We wish you lots of luck and enjoyment in years to come.”

To coastal walks, luck, and enjoyment!  And birthdays.  Happy birthday me.

To the New Year, and all its possibilities

A very Happy New Year to you, gentle reader!  I hope as 2012 turned into 2013 you were celebrating with people you love.

I spent today catching up on sleep and laundry, walking on the Heath in the late afternoon, looking at London in the gloaming, meeting old friends unexpectedly, and coming home to one of Deri’s fabulous pasta sauces.

I made a few Resolutions this year.  In times past mine have often been quite concrete – when I was twelve I wanted to learn to wolf-whistle,  at thirteen I decided to teach myself to like black coffee, the NYE I spent with Jane I resolved to decorate my flat so it felt a little bit more like hers – or the immeasurable oughts: to be more organised, to be less profligate, with words and money, to get fit, be more productive, to be better.

Last year, I didn’t make any at all, and it turned out to be quite a year!  So I was wondering whether I’d make any this year, in the shower and on my way to work yesterday, and a few floated into my head and kind of stuck.  They are somewhat nebulous, but they also mean quite a lot to me, so I thought I would share them in case they resonate with you, too.

1. To be true to myself
2. To be kind
3. To do more.

Being Kind means both to myself, and to other people.  Because sometimes I find it difficult to be nice at home when I have spent the day caring for my patients and looking after their families.  And it also means writing more letters, and looking for the good in people.  By Doing More I mean finishing more things as well as making grand plans, being happier drawing lines under things even if they are not perfect, and embarking on more things especially if I think they will require lots of time or effort (and so often they don’t, and that makes me happy too).

If I hadn’t thought of those myself, I would have been quite happy borrowing Miss Whistle’s Wishes for 2013, or any of Lara’s wonderful Resolutions, and this year I will also be trying to keep the following in mind:

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My lovely new calendar, a present from New York from my mama

So here’s to 2013.  To adventures, new friends, making things, spending more time with people we love, cooking, eating, laughing, sharing, frugality and extravagance in the best possible balance, grit and determination, courtesy, finding beauty in the unexpected, finding beauty in the beautiful, grace, honesty, integrity, wit, gratitude, wisdom, trying new things, listening, reading, writing, learning, climbing mountains, rowing lakes, sleep, generosity, acceptance, glamour, discipline, wondering and wonderment, exuberance, faith, giving pause, running headlong, humility, health, strength, and happiness.

It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas…

Last year, our Christmas tree was one I’d found on the pavement, a potted tree which someone had put out with their bins the preceding January.  It summered in my parents’ garden, spent Christmas with us, and has now been rehabilitated, planted in the Lake District amongst the old pines, there when my parents bought the cottage, and the newer oaks and ashes* which my dad planted twenty-five years ago.

This year, we bought a tree from the covered band-stand-type-thing outside Kentish Town station.  The cheapest, and smallest! they had, it is considerably larger than last year’s resident, and has allowed me to dress it with all our fairy lights and most of my hoard of Christmas decorations.

The lights are on a timer, so they welcome me home from work each day, and if I leave the bedroom door open, the light spills into the corridor and wakes me up.  Much nicer than the usual rude awakening by telephone alarm clock!  It is magical, too, eating breakfast by the light of the Christmas tree – although most days I am racing around trying to find my keys and some clean socks, and the ignored tree sits there quietly shining for an hour in the morning before I stomp off to work.

Apart from the tree, though, it hasn’t felt much like Christmas.  As most people I speak to agree, it might be the the weather (we are British, after all): warm for the time of year, and raining, rather than frosty and clear.  It is also that life in all its wondrous guises keeps getting in the way.  I started work in Intensive Care at the beginning of December, at one of the most famous units in Europe (not through anything clever I’d done, just by random job allocation), and I’m clambering up the steepest learning curve I can remember.  To my astonishment, I love it.  Less surprisingly, it is fairly all-consuming, leaving me little room to think about Christmas, New Year – or my poor neglected blog!

The lack of Christmas spirit is not for want of trying, I might add.  I have been piping old Festivals of Carols via the stereo from YouTube, mulling wine, all presents (bought either over the summer or from the internet) are wrapped and somewhere near the tree, and we have managed to write and deliver most of our Christmas cards.

Tonight we are having a big Christmas dinner with friends – in black tie because, as Elle said, the only opportunities we seem to have for dressing up these days are weddings, and isn’t that a bit glum?  I’ll be wearing a green dress, with silver shoes and a silver glitter clutch.  Because when you’re not feeling Christmassy, it’s time to dress up like a Christmas tree…

Old shoes, new-ish clutch.  This should be enough sparkle for one person, don’t you think?

Happy Christmas, everyone!  I hope you have a lovely holiday, however you like to spend it.  Thanks for being with me in my sporadic blog forays, and for continuing to inspire me with yours.  Seasonal joy to you, until we meet again in 2013!

*:(