People are Lovely

(An unashamedly non-baking post)

Isn't it lovely when people are unexpectedly ace? I know there are rotters in the world (and the Government, mutter mutter) but there are also so very many kind, thoughtful people who are just Good Eggs.

Recently I had transport problems. My Vespa had a terrible petrol smell all of a sudden. It seemed it was leaking petrol but only when the engine was running. This was definitely Not Good.

My friendly and accommodating garage promised to slot me in the very next day if I could get the bike to them. They didn't really have a gap but "seeing as it's you, we'll sort something out." I thanked him and promised him a cupcake.

The next day the leak became a gush and the bike's rear wheel skidded in the petrol slick, causing me to come off. It was a bit painful and a lot embarrassing (and nearly gave my poor partner a heart attack in the car behind me). The bike limped along another 200 yards and conked out completely. It started to rain.

I rang the garage and mewled pathetically down the phone at them, "whinge, whinge, broken down, whinge, fell off, whinge, raining, whinge." Their van was miles away. However, he rang back and had managed to find a way. He came himself (he isn't a mechanic) and brought one of the mechanics he'd pulled off another job, came out with a very small van that could manage a Vespa. We got the bike limping along as far as the garage, they squeezed time in their very busy fully booked day and they repaired the minor fault that had caused the problems. And they charged me £13.

I love my garage.

Then a neighbour had a bit of bad luck. We rallied 'round as good neighbours do and again I was struck by how nice it is that people are friendly and helpful to one another. Just a bit of consideration makes the world so much more pleasant.

So here's a list of (some of the many) lovely, thoughtful and ace people I am appreciating:

Mark, who brought me coffee and chocolate in bed on a bad day

Ali, for sending a lovely email when I needed one

Rebecca, for all the kind things she does for my kids and for endless coffees in the morning

Emma, for sharing her exciting news with us

Lesley, for being astonishingly supportive above and beyond the call of duty for a tutor

Val and all her staff, for being the cornerstone of my business

Mum and Dad, for being about as ace as it is possible for parents to be

Claire, for recommending me for a profitable job

Luke, for being an all-round star

SJ, for gardening help and suggestions

Rose, Lucy, Jo and Debbie, for running a wonderful film making programme my son loved

Tracy, Ro and Helen T, for online chats

I hope your life is similarly blessed with superstars

Link-y post

Here are some links to Good Things -

• the lovely plum cake - which is dead easy as well as delicious, so what's not to like?
• my talented friend Jo's blog about her sewing projects (and life in general)
• Nic's exciting blog about her plans to travel the UK learning about becoming a smallholder
• A shop I like to browse for baking things
• Read It Swap It, a great idea; swap your old books for something new to read
• a very lovely yarn shop run by friendly and helpful people

I'm assuming you all have iPlayer in your favourites bar already, so i won't bother with that other than to say having Radio 4 on iPlayer is one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century.

Back to school

Just a quick one this time. The kids are settling into school with the usual ups and downs, gardening projects and household stuff grind ever onwards. I am starting to wonder where all this Free Time I was promised has got to - despite a week of all three kids in full time school I seem to have dashed trying desperately to cram all the work into the available hours.

There's been a real shift in my workload and in my working days. The soft play centre wants to try having all their weekly cake done on one day, which turns Wednesday from my day off to my busiest day. The Deli has been really quiet, and orders are down by about a third. I got in touch to chat about it; if there was a problem with the quality or appeal of my cakes, i needed to address it immediately. However, it's been a drop in sales across all product ranges and apparently lots of other retail outlets are finding a similar drop.

I guess that credit crunch is still, erm, crunching. (What is the correct verb for a credit crunch? Answers on a postcard...)

I'm getting quite a few requests for birthday cakes by word of mouth or from my association with the play centre. I've got a busy couple of weekends lined up with them. This is great for the business but not much good for helping me get my raised beds finished in time to plant the spring bulbs.

College restarted. It's lovely to see everyone again but 3 hours for swearing at royal icing and blocked piping tubes made me feel like we'd never left. I love what we learn to do but the process is often rather fraught with cussing and stomping off for emergency caffeine rations. Which is counterproductive, of course, as what is really needed is a steady hand. Steady hands after a full day or work and kid-wrangling are rare enough. Caffeine fuelled steady hands are rarer still.

What I really ought to be doing is promoting the relaunch of the cake box scheme. It is planned work at retail profit margins, it's quite labour intensive but it's worth it. However, the thought of selling makes my toes curl. I might just put it off a little bit longer...

Coming over all Keats-like

Here we are in Autumn and I'm feeling very Ode To Autumn- 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' and all that sort of thing. (A-Level Eng Lit lingers in the brain somewhat)

Still worshipping the twin gods of Seasonality and Local Produce, I've been dabbling with more recipes. I can get away with lemon and raspberry cake for another few weeks because my own raspberries are only just coming out. However, the Big News in the garden at the moment is the plethora of plums (what a nice bit of alliteration). I've made 6 jars of plum jam and we still have a good crop on the trees. So, plum cake it is.

I've tested 3 recipes so far. One of them was horrid - claggy and pointless. One was not bad but had no longevity and the taste didn't really wow me. It was essentially a vanilla sponge with halved plums on top. The other - the first one I tried - is lovely. It's full of chopped plums, sultanas and cinnamon and it tastes only just sweet enough. For the moment I can use my own plums too (if Z and I don't eat them all first) so I get the double glow of using things from the garden and being in touch with the tastes of the season.

As always, I get other people's verdicts too. I sliced it up and took it to the playground at school pick-up time. It was enthusiastically received. In fact, my lovely mate Julie only waited until she'd got back to her house before texting me an order for it for the next day. The deli is keen as well. The cake did quite well in on practical issues, too. I wrapped a large slice and put it in a tin, and put another slice in the freezer. The frozen slice was pretty good and the fresh slice kept a decent texture for 3 or 4 days before feeling a bit stale. That makes it a goer - Hurray!

Apples are also coming into season again, which means Riet's apple cake is back on the menu. I've rather missed it. I'll do a dummy run before I start supplying the shop with it but I expect to be selling it within the month.

Balancing act

The summer holidays are well underway. The weather is a little ropey and as a result the soft play centre is incredibly busy; if they are, so am I. With M down south a fair bit, L enrolled on a film making project in the city centre, all three kids wanting heaps of fun and me having a fair whack of work ahead, some delicate balancing of time and energy is needed.

This is one of the few holidays I've dreaded. The other one was the year M told me the week before the summer holidays started that he would be working away the entire time. Other than that, I LOVE the holidays and resent the return of school terms when school gets the best of my kids and I get the tired and grumpy bits at either end of the day. So, a fairly new experience for me to look at the holidays and think, "How am I going to manage it all?!"

After a stint of being all in a tizz, I thought about it logically. Around my work commitments I have Monday mid morning to mid afternoon free, same again Tuesday. Wednesday I'm free from 9 through til Thursday lunchtime, and I'm free from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. This means we can have short activities or outings on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, and we can have full days out on Wednesdays. Other than that the kids can play here or at friends' houses. That's not half bad. They can have a really nice summer that way, even if it isn't the overnight trips hither and yon they are used to.

So, what could we do that wasn't too expensive, too tiring (for me, if I've got to come home and work at the end of the trip), was fun for all 3 of them and didn't involve needing a car? A mix of stuff at home and trips out, and if we can swing a London trip while M's down south, all the better.

We thought about things we liked to do and wrote our ideas on slips of paper which we put into 2 jars - Home and Out. At the start of the week we pick 6 or 7 slips out and stick them on a list, then we work out which days that week it would be best to do them. Here's our list for this week:

Science experiment
Library
Play on the Wii

Bake

Swimming

Go to the park

Board Games

We went to the park yesterday, then they played on the Wii while I worked. Today is the Library then swimming. Wednesday looks good for baking and doing a science experiment. Other choices for the holidays include having a sleepover, going to the museum, watching a DVD, a family hike and an arts and crafts day.

On the whole I think it will work out well. The kids all made suggestions (although I vetoed several of L's, which involved spending lots or having a car. The boy aims high.) They love choosing things from the jars and keep going over to check the week's list.

Their enthusiasm for it is a great relief to me. I had a sizeable amount of guilt because I am working while also looking after them. Until now they've had train trips to York and Halifax, overnight visits to friends pretty much all over the UK, 3 or 4 days each summer staying with M near London, trips to the zoo... a pretty good time of it, on reflection. I just can't provide that now because of my work commitments and I was feeling guilty for denying them all those lovely things.

On the work front I have a small wedding to do cupcakes for, a christening cake possible in a few weeks, heaps of regular work and some new recipes to try. I did promise I'd get to grips with pastry this year and I've totally failed to do that, and I need to look into packaging and couriers in the coming months with a view to mail order cake. But mostly my plan is to just get through the necessary work as best I can while the kids are off and leave all the optional stuff for when they are back at school and I'm not wasting valuable playtime.

I hope everyone is having a lovely summer,

J x

Time for cake

It occurred to me that I've been a bit slack in posting recipes. I realised this today, staying at Mum and Dad's house. I wanted to bake soda bread and make butter with B and her cousins while Z was mountaineering with his dad. I couldn't remember the quantities so I googled my own blog on Mum and Dad's laptop to look it up (Baking For Beginners Part 2). Googling one's own blog might be the height of onanism, but I honestly was just after the recipe.

Anyway, I had a look at what else I'd posted so I could make some other bits and pieces and it struck me I ought to have some more things up here. So, here are the bookends of my baking career -

The First Cake I Baked
(insert fanfare)
When people ask me about how I got into baking as a career they ask if I'm professionally trained or if I've just always baked. I usually answer, "I didn't bake before I had kids." This is not strictly true. I baked every Sunday morning for about 3 years, and I always baked the same thing - a loaf of banana bread. I'd take slices of it into work with me when I was working in the Call Centre - godawful job and no place for a grown up - and on Wednesday, the last day it would be still nice to eat, I'd bring the rest of it in to share with the people I worked with. It's easy and it's fast to mix up. It is also the only recipe I know in ounces because that gives it a 2, 2, 4, 6, 8 rhythm that is easy to remember.

2 (eggs) 2 (bananas) 4 (ounces butter) 6 (ounces brown sugar) 8 (ounces self raising flour)

See? Easy peasy.

Beat the butter and sugar until light. Mash overripe bananas and tip them in, along with the eggs. Mix well. Sift in the flour and combine well. Pop it into a lined loaf tin and bake at 180 for about an hour (or until a skewer comes out clean). You may need to cover it loosely with foil for the last 15 minutes to stop it browning too much.

You can add nuts, chocolate chops, sultanas, anything you like. It's best left to cool totally before slicing; otherwise you risk breaking it. Lovely spread thinly with butter. Oh, and ace for picnics because it's fairly robust, a compact shape that won't get too bashed and it's easy to have whopping thick slices or thin delicate slices depending on how many picnickers you are trying to eek it out for.

My Most Recent Cake
(insert double fanfare)
Raspberry and Lemon Cake

Sift together
225g self raising flour
175g caster sugar
1 tsp baking powder
Stir in
75g ground almonds
zest of a lemon
In a large jug, mix together
250g plain yoghurt
3 eggs
150ml vegetable or sunflower oil
and pour it into the dry mix. Stir until combined, then carefully fold in
150g frozen raspberries

Bake at 170 degrees for about 70 minutes - keep checking after 50 mins and cover as necessary. I like it in a 23 cm round springform tin but a 20cm square tin would also do.

When cooked, leave the cake to cool a moment while you make the glaze.
100g sugar
30-50ml water
juice of that lemon
Simmer in a saucepan until its volume has reduced by at least half. Poke holes in the cake and pour the glaze over it. Leave it to absorb before you remove it from the tin.

So there you go - where I started and where I'm at now. I hope you find something you like.

I'm off to bake with giggly small people. Wish me luck!

Taking Stock

Somehow these past few weeks have got away from me. There I was thinking the summer was months away, and it turns out the kids break up from school next week.

The glorious heat and sunshine of June gave me a bit of a break. Orders from the soft play centre dropped like a stone - who wouldn't rather be in the park in such weather - and the deli orders dwindled. Hot weather isn't cake weather. It's weather for ice creams, bowls of strawberries, long cool drinks with straws and parasols in.

As well as working in the garden and having some super days out with the kids, I used the time to take stock a little. I've done my accounts and have a clearer view of what is working and what isn't. I also know precisely how little money I've made, which sent me into rather a bad mood for a bit. It's one thing having a rough idea. It's another thing entirely to see exactly how much has come in and - more depressingly - gone out during the 18 months I've been Cake Boxing.

I need to keep looking for ways to make the business more profitable. If your target is to achieve minimum wage pretty steadily and you can't even manage that, there is something askew in the business model.

On the plus side, I've had loads of work from a variety of sources. The cake box scheme was enthusiastically received and people have asked that I tell them when it's starting up again. The birthday cake and cupcake orders are picking up from referrals and word of mouth. Now that the weather's less clement the play centre is heaving and they are selling stonking amounts of my cakes and cookies. My seasonal cakes and new ranges at the deli have been very successful too.

Speaking of seasonal, I've spent a week faffing about with raspberry and lemon cake ideas and I think I've got a winner now. It's not very sweet despite a fair whack of sugar; raspberries can be quite tart. I have to use frozen berries because fresh ones vary so much in price and in quality. That's rather a shame and if I were baking just for the family I'd stick to fresh. Still, it's a nice balance of flavours, a good moist texture and should also have a pretty good shelf life (important for the deli!) and I am rather proud of it.

On the home front our lives are going through some changes over the next couple of months. I'll be interested to see how they all pan out. The Big Lad, all 11 years of him (eek!) is off to Scotland camping with Scouts for a week and will be starting high school at the end of the summer. The Divine Miss B starts school and already wears her new uniform most days out of sheer excitement. Z's the only one whose life carries on as normal, moving up a year in school.

For the first time in 11 1/2 years I will be finished with toddler groups, NCT groups, CBeebies and daytime childcare. From 9:15 to 3:10 I will be left to my own devices - well, from October anyway, as B is part time for the first little while. I'd like to get all dreamy at the prospect of some free time but in fact I've already crammed my days with work until at least Christmas.

Hmm - a rather bitty blog post this time, isn't it? Sorry. I'd like to revise, rewrite and refine it to make it a better read. However, the number of half-finished blog posts I've got cluttering the place up ought to teach me to post this one now before it joins the others in the Land Of Unfinished Blather never destined to see light of day. So that's what I'll do and you'll have to tolerate my ill-formed ramblings as they stand.

Have a lovely summer,

J x