No nicey nicey, just typey typey

No preliminaries – too much baking for niceties.

It started off with a fruit and nut loaf – naturally the fruit was raisins and the nuts were walnuts. Hardly a surprise. All in all it made quite a nice firm fruit loaf – I would say that a few spices would not go astray though.

To go with soup for lunch we had cheese loaves. There are quite a lot of loaf recipes in the Edmonds – this one had quite a substantial quantity of cheese too and followed the standard “scone method” – rub in the butter etc etc. The only problem was that the recipe called for two small loaf tins.

Now I don’t happen to own two small loaf tins, just one large loaf tin, and that happened to have a fruit and nut loaf in it. I spent a lot of time looking around my kitchen, eyeing up potential receptacles. I ended up cooking it in two bowls, just stock standard soup bowls. It worked fine, apart from the fact that the loaves stuck to the bowls like excrement to a blanket. So I removed the loaves as best I could and then there was really nothing else for it but to eat all the tasty crispy, cheesy bits stuck to the bowl. Damn. Life is hard.

Next were princess fingers. Another naming triumph from Edmonds. Princes fingers were a cake base spread with jam, sprinkled with cherries and walnuts and then topped with a meringue with coconut, orange zest (or rind as the Edmond’s calls it) and cornflakes. That’s a lot going on in one princess finger! I will say though that they were very popular with the punters at work.

Afghans need no introduction. They were fantastic. I made them nice and small – by “I” I mean the husband and chief biscuit roller under my direction. They were quite deeply cocoay and surprisingly adult. As the Sunday magazine product review says – will make again.

You may notice a theme here. Seeing I had to buy cornflakes for the Edmonds I thought I might as well use them up. An added side note was that we had the brother in law staying and there was a race to the bottom of the cornflake packet. I won but then I have always been quite competitive. The last cornflake recipe was chocolate nut bars – a cocoa based slice with cornflakes and walnuts. I know I made it but oddly I can’t remember it at all… This is most unlike me as usually I have an exceptional memory. I now have a fear that there is an ice cream container somewhere with slowly decaying chocolate nut bar in it…

I have a deep deep love of Barkers apple and mint jelly. It’s not stocked by all that many supermarkets but is truly worth the effort it takes to find it. So when I had to make jelly (of the jam rather than gelatine variety) the choice was easy. The Edmonds merely provides a rough outline of what should be done – I will admit I referred to Alison Holst for a recipe for mint jelly. I don’t feel bad about it. I haven’t actually tried the resulting jelly yet but I’m sure it will be good.

Gosh I did a lot of cooking in one day! So much that it has taken me two days of typing to get this far. Might be partially due to the pinball. Damn pinball.

Tennis cake. Has, as far as I could tell, very little to do with tennis. Another fruit cake but one with hardly any raisins in it. Every raisin is a bad raisin though so it doesn’t get extra points for having a low raisin population. It did have quite a lot of cherries and peel as well, I’m fine with both of those so with a little raisin dodging I managed to try some tennis cake. Didn’t taste like tennis.

And to finish off the day I made Oriental Sundae. This was jelly pored over fruit and sponge. A bit like trifle but without custard – so obviously not as good as trifle. Not that I’ve actually had a lot of trifle I my time. Honestly – something about the soggy sponge…

The remarkable thing about the sundae was it made me realise I never wrote up the billy sponge. At least I can’t see it anywhere? Unless I’m going mad? C’est possible! Anyway – in case I didn’t write about the billy sponge it was fantastic – picture this – take a le creuset (or similar) casserole dish. Grease and then coat the inside of the dish with sugar. Pour in the sponge mixture, put the lid on and cook. As I said before it was fantastic. It was so tall and perfectly flat across the top with a really nice sugary crust like a langue de chat. I loved it. A lot.