Yesterday

So this week has not been so fantastically productive. I’ve been out and about every night which is not conducive to baking – there is however a long weekend almost here which should help with the statistics. Even better it is a long weekend with bad weather which means minimal outdoors work which means more kitchen time.

We have been to the quiz this week. Now I’m not a poor loser. There was a new team this week. We came second. I am still slightly infuriated about one of the questions - -it was what they call “the ponderous puzzle” – you get clues and decreasing points as rounds go on so the idea is to answer early for maximum points.

In short the question was what song was voted the number 1 song of the last century by BBC Radio2 and is the most widely covered song in existence. The answer was “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Ok, not a bad song, but the most widely covered of all time? I’ve never heard a cover of it and in a very limited poll of my work mates no one else had either. I’m not bitter, I just don’t believe it. At any rate even if we’d got full marks for it we would have come second.

Sunday was Football. True to form we lost again but in our defence we were much smaller than the competition. I was named our man of the match – or as our Coach put it “there were several people who had reasonable games and Debbie had the best of the reasonable games”. I’ll take that.

So the only baking that got done was on Sunday night becaue I have my conditioned my workmates to expect baking on a Monday. Not quite a pavlovian response – yet.

Shortbread – Wasn’t too bad, I even cut it out in pretty heart shapes with decorative fork marks. Fantastic. Unfortunately I overcooked both trays - one was salvageable, the other was beyond redemption as shortbread really does need to be white and this was heading towards charcoal. Must pay more attention.

Now you might think I would learn. I made rock cakes. I also overcooked the rock cakes. My excuse is that I use the microwave timer for the baking, and then if I need to use the microwave the system collapses. I’m standing by that excuse, it sounds better than general incompetence.

I also made a sponge – a sponge! It was a truly inspirational thing – each layer almost 3 inches high and perfectly 6 inches in diameter thanks to the lovely Jenna and her tins. And isn't my cake carrier fantastic, I am in love with it.

I may have got a little ambitious and tried to fill it with jelly. The Edmonds instructs you to set the jelly in a tin the same size, it doesn’t however tell you that you should make the jelly up stronger than usual. It was not quite structurally up to the rigorous demands of cake decorating. It was very very tasty though and has provided some good learnings for future sponge displays.

Life with the baking has become so hectic that I have had to turn to doing other"projects" at work. I'll admit it. I have a craft problem. My name is Debbie and I'm a crocheter. Not that I do it very often, I don't really have time, but one of the girls at work was picking up two Kittens over the weekend which was an unmissable crochet excuse. Unfortunately having absolutely no spare time meant that I had to take my ball of orange wool and crochet hook to work. I even had to take it to a restuarant for lunch on Thursday. The shame. Mine and my companions. You should hear what they all said about my sock zebra - but that perhaps is for a different post...