Re-run from 2012 (Baking blog)

In 2012 I had set myself a challenge to bake 50 lots of cake/biscuits etc and take them (one a week) up to London to share with my colleagues.  It wasn't until I was about 17 items into this challenge that a fellow woodcarver at an after work hobbyplace talked me into blogging the recipes and any stories that went with them.  

After 50 I lost interest in continuing that blog (challenge completed) and a year or three later I killed off the email address I had set up to operate the blog without thinking that naturally that would kill off my access to the blog itself.  Stupid woman.  The last entries on the blog were early 2014.  10 years ago.  I guess the unused account will get closed down by Blogger at some stage so I decided to 'save' the material by copy pasting and reposting it here.  

Mr T would call it a hijacking.  Mr T is not here to provide inspiration to continue his blog so I will pad it out with whatever I feel like posting.  Maybe you will find one 'take home' recipe in the collection that will appear bit by bit over the next year or so.  I find that a lot of my original posts lacked photos and I might have to go on a bit of a baking spree to remedy that in the reposts.

Because blogging followed baking by some weeks at the start, the posts were not in the order the items were baked, so the numbers are all over the place. When you see number 7, you haven't missed 6 of them.  Just roll with it.

(And if you are wondering about Dojo - I was teaching Aikido in those days)

About

It’s hackneyed stuff now - turn a significant age and set a few challenges to prove there's still some life in the old girl. None of my challenges involved writing a blog about it. One of my challenges however was, over the course of a year, to bake 50 ‘cakes’ for my colleagues, and make every one a different recipe. It was never the intention to be 50 cakes as such, just 50 baked items - but it became my '50 cakes challenge'.

Perhaps the real challenge has been getting the baking from my kitchen on the south coast to my place of work in London - hence the blog name - but not everything has been subjected to the motorbike ride test. 

Baking progressed fitfully through the Autumn of 2011 - a few batches of biscuits and hardy baked goods like flapjacks negotiated the A3 - but it was interrupted for a few weeks while I visited family in the Antipodes. Blighty was in the clutches of Winter when I returned, and I bowed to (my age and) the voice of reason, resorting to a commute by train – cake tin clutched under my arm every Monday morning. 

The following recipes are a mix of inheritances from my mother and grandmothers, those basic things you are drilled on in primary school cooking class, gifts from friends, things clipped from calendars and magazines, and a few acquired from that wonderful resource – the internet.

It was when I arrived at N^o. 14, (a recipe of such meagre proportions that I decided to double it), that I choose to extend (for that week) the cake consuming opportunities to include the good folk at ‘Art in the Park’

Art in the Park

- a wonderful studio in Burgess park, London where I have the pleasure every Monday evening to chip away at some woodcarving project and socialize with other similarly motivated ‘chippers’ – and Cynthia. (Cynthia is a marvelous volunteer at the Art in the Park and Heart Garden establishment, cheerful, cheering, and full of enthusiasm and encouragement – just ‘not a carver of wood’.)  Art in the Park Website here



N^o.14 was consumed with enthusiasm, the recipe requested and the recipe duly delivered a week later along with a sample of N^o. 15 – consumed with equal enthusiasm.

This Blog came has come about simply through their encouragement. It had never been my intention, design or desire to blog about anything. I don’t use Facebook, or Tweet, and still write letters by hand with a fountain pen! (In fact this has been drafted long-hand, on the back of paper scrounged from the recycle bin, in moments snatched here and there – the current chapter composed lying on the Dojo floor waiting for my Aikido juniors to turn up for their class.)

By the way, I make no apology for the measurements throughout being in a mixture of metric and imperial. I am 'of an age' such that it is the way I grew up – using both. Both make sense to me but in truth my old-fashioned balancing scales only have imperial weights so I am adept at conversion.