Shame on you!

Edmonds, I’ve found you out. Sunday afternoon – after drying off, I decided it was time for just a little more baking. I made Khaki cake. And do you know what? You probably don’t. Khaki cake is the exact same thing as the morning’s chocolate peppermint cake but with 1tbsp of coconut added. Come on1 That’s hardly a new recipe. Stranger still it says to cook Kakhi cake for 5-10 minutes longer than chocolate peppermint cake. For 1 tbsp of coconut? Actually I did need to cook it 5 minutes longer but I’m putting that down to the poor quality of my oven and possibly human error with temperature setting rather than the effects of the coconut.

Anyway, it was pretty good. The recipe said to fill it with chocolate buttercream icing but perversely there is no recipe of orange buttercream icing. There was however orange buttercream icing, which was very nice, if not all that buttery.

I also made coconut dream. This was voted by one (rather influential) member of staff as the best thing to come out of Edmonds so far. Now I might argue that that lofty position belonged to the coconut kisses with passion fruit icing or the marshmallow slice but I’m sure my opinion counts for little. Coconut Dream is a cakey base covered with a beaten egg, coconut and peanut topping. It wasn’t bad but I’m not a huge peanut fan, I would have preferred almonds I think.

So that had the tins filled. For dessert I made blancmange. Well I attempted blancmange. I still seem unable to heat milk to a sufficient temperature on my stove without burning it but I had taken it as far as I could and it was not looking particularly set. I was tempted to add more cornflour. I didn’t. I should have.

I did give it a couple of minutes in the microwave just to make sure that I had cooked all the cornflour there to it’s full capacity. I had. I thought perhaps the transformation in texture between hot and cold would be more drastic than I was anticipating. It wasn’t. Several hours later it was a semi congealed mess with the consistency and appearance of a very large bowl of mucus. Sorry but it had to be said. The only plus I can find is that it slipped down the plughole very nicely.

Because I can never cook too much milk on my stove in one day I decided to make white sauce. That’s not entirely true. I felt like cauliflower cheese. There was a white sauce recipe in Edmonds – but oddly not a cheese sauce recipe. Usually Edmonds tends to towards more variations on a theme rather than less. In fact white sauce is almost the worse culprit for that treatment – I will be particularly enjoying my caper sauce – capers in white sauce – the ideal accompaniment to boiled mutton head. Mmmmmm
And I know you are all dying to know how the quiz went. We came second again. I am almost getting resigned to it. I felt slightly better knowing that the team we keep losing to is actually coming first in the national competition. We are not that far behind. Well not in a national sort of context.