Baking Purgatory

Some days I think I shouldn’t be let near a kitchen without supervision. About ¾ of the way through cooking dinner last night I decided that I should really do some baking. Leafing through I found ”spice cake” which fitted my criteria – no creaming, no cutting out etc. Fantastic. Or so I thought.

Step 1 - boil water sugar, butter, raisins and spices together for 2 minutes. Now naturally I hadn’t actually measured out all of the ingredients first and put them in the saucepan so I measured out the water, that boiled while I was measuring out the sugar, added it to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the butter, added that to the saucepan, that boiled while I measured out the raisins – you are getting the picture here right? I figured it was probably the raisins that needed 2 minutes rather than the rest so I waited until they had been in for about 2 minutes before I took the pan of the heat.

Meanwhile I thought I would measure out the flour and baking powder. Now in my defence the recipe required 4 heaped teaspoons of baking powder – that is one hell of a lot of baking powder. And naturally I didn’t have this much baking powder. And the stir fried vegetables were turning a rather unhealthy shade of olive. So – I thought to myself – the only thing that will change if I leave it sitting is the raisins, so if I drain off the raisins and then recombine the whole lot later (after I’ve been and bought replacement baking powder) everything will be fine. I served up dinner – the husband was charitable enough not to mention the state of the vegetables, or more likely, he didn’t notice – and then raced off to the shops and bought the baking powder.

Now this, this is the really good moment.

As I was standing at the checkout I remembered the 2 boxes of baking powder one of the girls at work had given me when she shifted house. For some reason I had it in my head that it was baking soda. It turned out to be baking powder.

Now you might have thought that at this point I would have reached the peak of my incompetence. You’d be wrong.

After I got home and looked despairingly at my 3 boxes of baking powder I thought I should really reboil my raisins in the syrup to take me back to where I would have been. Done. Read the next step – when the mixture is cool add to the sifted dry ingredients. WHAT! I was actually supposed to boil the whole lot up and then leave it to cool. And now I’ve just reheated it. I could have cried, but I didn’t. I waited until the mixture was not skin-searingly hot any more and then added it to the dry ingredients. The whole thing foamed up to quite amazing proportions. That was possibly why I was supposed to leave it to cool. I was no longer in a mood to care.

I tipped the mix into a shallow tin (again, no measurements) and baked for an hour, which I thought sounded like an excessively long time but it did actually take that long. No I didn’t taste it, but it had better be damn good!