Hestia...tries a spot of baking

I spotted this Claudia Roden recipe over at Faux Fuchsia's place.  She's so together and tidy and gorgeous and funny and effortlessly well-groomed and posts the most lovely food photos of her creations too.  I thought I'd give it a go, and hoped that some of Faux's magic would rub off on me.

Stop laughing at the back there.....

I began one Monday morning, looking out all the ingredients, carefully buttering the cake tin and even cutting a greaseproof paper circle to fit in the bottom....and set to, all the while listening to Radio 2 and pretending that I was a Real Grown Up.  I was wearing make up and perfume and nice trousers.  I hope you're impressed.





There are only a handful of ingredients for this cake - originally made with oranges - and there's no fat and no flour.  I know. An Atkins' fan's DREAM.  And I was determined not to lay into the cake mixture.  I was, after all, an adult who would not be caught DEAD in kitchen with a mixture-spattered wooden spoon clamped between her lips in manner of dog-caught-stealing-sausages.

Faux Fuchsia's recipe involved lemons instead of oranges and so I carefully boiled my three lemons until they were soft.  I even made myself a coffee while I waited for them to cool down.  This being a Grown Up Thing is strangely soothing right enough, I thought to myself (mental state:  Serene).

The lemons were duly halved, pips removed and whizzed to a sharp pulp....carefully stirred it into the rest of the ingredients and then tipped artfully into my well-prepared cake tin.

I smoothed the surface and congratulated myself on a job well-done (mental state: smug)

I licked the spoon.

Absolutely vile.  Really.  I sincerely doubted that this was how it was supposed to taste.  I hurried back to the computer and checked the ingredients again - eggs (six) 250g of ground almonds and sugar.  SUGAR.  I had put the sugar on the work surface but failed to decant any into the mixture.

Back to the kitchen.... (mental state: furious with self)

The mixture was tipped BACK into the mixing bowl and the sugar added.  Still determined to Do It Right I cleaned the remnants of unsugary mixture out in lashings of hot water (even used my rubber gloves).......dried it, rebuttered, relined and tipped the mixture once again into the cake tin.  By this time I was feeling less charitably inclined towards the state of Grown Upineness.

Slammed it into my PREHEATED oven (yes, I even had the oven on in advance) and started making soup.

By this time the Jeremy Vine show was on and I stood shouting at the radio as I chopped up my broccoli florets and leeks.  Must have been something about social security benefits or something that equally rattles the bars of my cage.  Mental state: somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler.

The soup was put on timer for 30 minutes and I swanned off to the mac to brag about being A Grown Up on Facebook.

Thirty minutes later I returned to the kitchen and saw, with my own disbelieving eyes, at least half the broccoli still lying on the chopping board in its virgin state.  A rant at Jeremy Vine too far, clearly.  I am absolutely CRAP at being an Adult, I decided, scraping the abandoned broccoli into the soup pan and setting the dinger to go in another 30 minutes.  By which time any nutrition in the veg would have been boiled to usefulness of wet cardboard.  Mental state:  Utterly pissed off.

The cake was removed from the oven - overcooked.  It looked like this:

Somewhat shiny for some reason, and a bit over-done around the edges, but it tasted DIVINE and Sonshine and I ate it all in three days.

Determined to make it FABULOUS, I looked out alllllll the ingredients the following weekend.  But this time I opted for a smaller cake tin (to make a thicker cake) and YES I remembered the sugar.

The deep cake tin turned out to be a mistake - it was well-burned on the outside, but still wobbled when you shook the tin. The arrival of visitors in the crucial last 10 minutes of baking resulted in it being VERY dark around the edges. But inside was soft, golden, moist and lemony.  Forgot to take a photo of it :-(

Sonshine and I ate it all in three days.

Last weekend, I was absolutely fucking determined that THIS CAKE WOULD NOT BEAT ME and I added my six eggs, the sugar, the ground almonds.....microwaved the 3 lemons (fed up with the boiling which takes aaaaages).... and put the whole lot back into the FIRST cake tin..... but THIS time I forgot to add the greaseproof paper base.

Cake baked to correct colour, but could not get arse out of pan. And the damn thing was burned again.

I had to poke at it with a plastic fish slice and tried to prize it out - but only suceeded in cutting about a centimetre off the base of the bloomin' thing.  Mental state: Where's the gin?

This is the base of the cake pan with the bottom of my cake still stuck to it.......*cue much sweary grumbling*

But, it tasted lovely.  We ate in 3 days.

This little cake experiment has resulted in Sonshine and I eating 18 eggs in 3 weeks.  I am now shovelling Movecol into me at the rate of a sachet per day.  I have the Anusol at the ready.

I have decided that I will never amount to even a hundredth of the woman that is the seriously lovely Faux Fuchsia and I have reverted back to my semi-feral state.