Tumbleweeds roll by

Hello Blog!

It's been 2 months since I last wrote anything, which is most remiss of me.  I'd like to say I was too busy lazing about in the sunshine or I was off having a fabulous time but actually I've been working.  And working. Then some more work in the gaps between the work.  I moved past busy and over-committed into Holy Crap I Need More Caffeine Stat.

A lot of my business has been to do with teaching.  I know, right? Me, actually teaching people things. Teaching used to figure on my Most Unlikely Job list, alongside athlete.  But here I am, over a year into home educating my son and running classes and workshops for baking and cake decorating.
I've done a couple of workshops here for 4 to 6 people. The kids' workshop had them making sugarpaste decorations, icing and decorating a celebration cake, using royal icing on biscuits, baking and icing cupcakes.   They took home all their creations and were so proud of themselves.  I got some lovely thank you notes; they were a wonderful group.  I'd post photos but I haven't asked their parents for permission and I do hate it when people put photos up without agreement
My next kids' workshop is this weekend.

Then there was a cupcake evening with 5 adults. They were all novice bakers so we went through basic techniques, made vanilla cupcakes and lemon and raspberry cupcakes, did buttercream icing with palette knives and piping bags, made sugarpaste decorations and drank Prosecco. Oh, and ate little cheese and marmite pastries I'd baked.  I am DEFINITELY making those again, they were delish.
Anyway, my adult students did marvellous work and have done so great baking at home as well, judging from the photos they're sending me.  I will do another class like that in a heartbeat (even though as the tutor I don't get Prosecco. Bummer.)

My other teaching work has been at local schools.  Lesley from Thomas Danby, my amazing tutor, would no doubt laugh her socks off at the thought of me teaching anyone cake decorating techniques.  I felt like the duffer of that class; there were so many talented people there I was often intimidated. But the level of stuff I'm teaching is the sort of thing I do week in and week out so i can teach it with my hands tied behind my back.

On Mondays I teach 15 people how to pipe royal icing, apply buttercream, model with sugarpaste and coat celebration cakes with sugarpaste. And example of the things wee do is the photo. The students are all women and girls - the youngest about 11, the oldest about 17 and their mums.  They are a lovely bunch. My favourite bit is watching them leave with the things they made, buzzing with a sense of achievement and happiness.  Passing on how to do something is VERY rewarding indeed.  I love what I do and I especially love helping others get fun from doing it too.

Tuesdays are more challenging.  It takes place in a primary school and is for family groups.  The age range is Reception to Year 10, with 22 people including the 5 parents.  Such a large group and enormous age range is very hard to manage successfully. Individually they are all very nice but as a group it's kind of overwhelming.  I have to dash between them so quickly, helping each one as s/he need it and setting projects that all skill levels can work within. I am always exhausted after that class.

I've also had more private commissions this last few weeks.  Some have been pretty straightforward. There have been red velvet cakes, cupcakes, plain birthday cakes with a message piped on. There have also been reflecting the passions of the recipients - hiking, lawn bowls and flowers, in one case and lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, poppies and daffodils in another. I was very proud of the flowers; quite a few things I'd never tried before. But they are awfully time-consuming and time is something I'm running short of just now.
 I think I'm averaging about 48 hours a week at the moment. Combined with Home Ed and parenting  - not to mention the twin horrors of laundry and washing up - I'm pretty much exhausted.  Today I hit the new low of having a glass of coke with a coffee chaser in a bid to keep going.

Still, I've no business to complain. I have a business I love, I'm in demand and never have to advertise for work, and I am getting better at it all the time.  I can sleep later on. 2013 maybe.

In The Merry Merry Month of May

Sorry it's been a month since I last wittered on at you all. I've been rather busy. May's not been entirely merry*, but it's had its good points.

I did my first wedding order, which was for cupcakes. Don't they look pretty? Perhaps individually placing each silver dragee along the spiral is a little fiddly, but I think it gives a lovely result.

My second wedding order went a bit wrong. The bride has called it off, so I have sent her mum a refund, minus the money I'd already spent on things for the order. It's a shame, as I was quite excited about doing it but heck, I'm not the one having the big emotional crisis.

I got that contract with a new outlet, and I started supplying them this weekend. I did the planned tasting session for both partners in the business and it went very well. But heck, why wouldn't it? What's not to like about someone offering you several different cakes and cookies with a nice cup or coffee and tea on a busy morning. We settled on what they'd start with and I gave them some advice about storage of the cakes to prolong shelf life and manage their stock. The longer the cakes and cookies keep fresh and look good, the better. Stale cake is somehow more depressing than no cake at all.

I'm not quite sure how much work it will mean - like my work with the deli, there will no doubt be a settling in period. However, I set my terms out clearly with regards to collection versus delivery and the notice I require. It feels good to have agreed this stuff up front.

I had my lovely weekend away in early May. It was fab to see my very lovely pals Laura and Alison again and the Gifted Children's May Ball gig was absolutely ace. Almost all of my science crushes were there, and most of my comedian crushes too so it was pretty much perfect. I really wish my pal Rach could have joined us, though; she would have loved it. Marcus Brigstock and Tim Minchin in one evening... on second thoughts it might have been too much for her and she'd have swooned. I wasn't wearing shoes suitable for carrying swooning mates.

I had some baking related adventures too. I took a cake to Absolute Radio for Dave Gorman. He does a bit in his stand up routine about never eating carrot cake again. I'd talked to him after the gig and he said "convince me I'm wrong, send me a cake." It was a lot more eccentric a thing to do when I was carrying a cake through London and knocking on the radio station door than it seemed in my kitchen, but what the hell. His producer and production assistant came to meet me and were really lovely. I saw Frank Skinner. He said Hi! Coo.

And the next day Dave and his co presenters Danielle and Martin mentioned it in the podcast (May 8th, at 33 minutes ish on the podcast, not that I'm obsessed or anything). They said it was "amazing cake, genuinely moist and delicious and lovely." I am all chuffed.

On the Saturday night I went to see Wicked, the musical, which was great fun. I met a Canadian woman there who wanted to learn to bake. We had a good chat and exchanged email addresses, and I am now helping her get started by email. It's fun. I get to be a mentor; how neat is that!

Then it was home again and back to work. As I've mentioned before, tastes change with the seasons. I've stopped offering chocolate gingerbread loaf until the autumn and needed to replace it with something more spring-like.

I've faffed about with a recipe and come up with a very nice elderflower cake that is currently selling well in the deli. I want to find an affordable berry cake recipe too, for summer. Some are just too expensive to be viable commercially, but I am confident I'll find something. I like the faffing.

Whoopie pies are selling well, too. They are as trendy as trendy can be right now, and although a bit of a faff to make are really delicious. I took some to the deli at the beginning of the month and they've been selling steadily ever since. I also got more positive comments from their inclusion May cake boxes than I've had for anything else ever. Evin the non-cake-eating deli owner loves them.

I truly hate their name, though. Whoopie pies. They are not pies. They do not fart when you sit on them. Still, what's in a name, as Juliet so naively asked. (Quite a lot, Julie my poppet, and if you'd picked a bloke with a different surname it would have been a longer play.)

I had another baking session with Z's Year 3 class this month as well. It was a bit, erm, interesting but that was the fault of the rubbish recipe and the teacher rather than the kids. The recipe was for chocolate chip muffins. The taste was bland, some parts of the recipe were pointless and messy and the flashes, bangs and burning smell coming from the staff room microwave was enough to give me nightmares. I won't bother typing of the recipe for you all because I promise you it was rubbish. 50g of melted chocolate and no cocoa between 12 muffins doesn't make a batter chocolatey, it makes it beige. Buying cheap nasty Asda Value bars of chocolate and asking the kids to bash it into chips rather than buying chocolate chips is also a mistake. A frustrating and messy one. Not one group managed to follow the recipe correctly, the teacher did not provide the correct implements and does not understand the difference between millilitres and grams, and I had a lot of rescuing to do to make sure all the kids got their 2 muffins.

Still, the muffins did rise impressively and the kids liked them. And that is the main thing.

The difficult parts of this month have been overwork, managing a poorly child, and being overtired. That the dishwasher packed in this weekend was pretty much the final straw, and Saturday found me sobbing like a toddler. I even regretted starting the business at all. However, a bit of sleep and a morning of doing nothing constructive whatsoever restored me to normality. Well, mostly, but enough to get by.

If I am going to continue making a go of this I do need to think carefully about how much work I take on, how to juggle family and work life and possibly stop doing other external stuff like volunteering. So obviously I'm doing another book swap party fundraiser this year and have offered some help to Cubs. And the school summer fair. Argh. However, I've partially opted out of my book groups until I've got a little more time and I'm looking at ways of managing the household more effectively. And I'm thinking about turning down a cake request that i think will be a pain to do and will mess up part of next weekend for insufficient financial reward. Just because I can do something doesn't mean I have to. That's the joy of self employment.

*That's a Stephen Foster song, by the way - In The Merry Merry Month of May. He wrote that in 1862. Why my head is cluttered with such stuff I do not know, but there you are.

Baking for beginners part 2

Last week I had my fourth baking class with Year 3. I was lucky enough to get to pick the project (and as a consequence provide them with all the stuff, hey ho) which gave me a little freedom. The previous time I had been very frustrated when an economising gesture ruined the biscuits the kids made because a cheaper, substituted ingredient caused them to collapse.

I thought it would be fun to do bread and butter; this is mostly because I think it is fun to make things the kids tend to assume you can only buy ready-made.

Because of time constraints I went for soda bread. Soda bread is dead easy. As I did the previous 3 times, I tested the process with Z and B on the weekend. I think if a 4 year old can manage it with supervision, 8 year olds should be able to manage it with minimum intervention. B was delighted. She had 'her' bread with the chilli we had for dinner that night, enjoyed a toasted slice with 'her' butter for breakfast, and showed off about it to her pals at Nursery. Quite rightly, too.

Our trial run established that double cream needs to be definitely at room temperature to make the butter and that soda bread takes less time than we usually spend. Oh, and that the oven needs as much time to heat up to the required 230 degrees as the bread takes to make, so it's best to turn it on before starting.

The kids were rather incredulous when i told them what we'd be making. As before, some had made bread before while some wouldn't know a rolling pin if it fell on their heads. I was pleased to see they all remembered how to wash their hands properly. They all did a super job.

DIY Butter -
200ml of double cream at room temperature. This is very important.
a jar with a tight fitting lid
Shake, shake, shake and shake. Remove the butter from the jar, press all the liquid out. If you are going to keep it for any length of time, rinse it over and over again to make sure you get every last bit of buttermilk out. Salt it if you like. If divvying up between loads of kids, put a heaped spoonful in mini cupcake cases and pop in the fridge for a bit.

Butter was the big hit. I talked them through the phases they could expect but the kids still pulled on my apron every 30 seconds to ask "is it butter now?" First the butter sloshes about a bit, then it barely seems to move as it becomes thick whipped cream. That lasts a while. Next is the slightly grainy phase when it looks a bit rubbish really. Then, suddenly there is a big SLOSH as the fat comes together to make butter and splashes about in the remaining buttermilk. Opening the jars to see their dollops of butter was so exciting. The kids all shouted to have a go squeezing the buttermilk and they were so keen to taste it.



Soda Bread
Sift 250g plain flour with
1 tsp salt and
1 tsp bicarb
Add 2 tsp brown sugar
Stir in 225ml plain yoghurt or buttermilk
Knead for a minute or two. Form into as high-domed a ball as you can. Slash the top with a deep X (or, if making it for a table of 6 kids, a star) and bake at 230 degrees for 12 minutes. Turn the oven temperature down to 200 degrees and bake for a further 15 minutes.

When the loaves had all been baked - in the same oven at the same time - the result was amazing. The loaves were each an accurate reflection of how the groups did. I've never seen such a blatant physical manifestation of cooperating and erm, not.

Two tables worked together very well. One of them in particular got a little enthusiastic about the kneading part and made the most beautiful loaf of soda bread I've ever seen. I was so impressed. Z's gang was one of those who did well, which is nice to know but not really surprising. They are a lovely group of kids.

Two tables pulled it together in the end after a rocky start, and produced prefectly edible bread, if not entirely appetising. One table (yes, the same one) did nothing but argue. They took twice as long as the others, clearly forgot to add the bicarb, didn't knead because none of them would get their hands sticky, probably added the salt three or four times over (based on the finished result) and produced an utter disaster of a loaf. It looked like home made salt dough we do for playdough, but baked to have a stiff crust around it. It would have been disappointing to take home and probably woulod have made them sick if they'd actually tried to eat it.

I went home and baked a replacement for them, although I did send their effort into the class as well. I felt a bit grumpy about it when I was dashing back to the school in the pouring rain, but it wasn't really much bother.

I had a very proud parenting moment when L told me I shouldn't have baked them a new one. "It is the natural consequence of their actions, Mummy. How else will they learn not to fight and to follow instructions?" Ah, the sweet pleasure of having your dearly held parenting beliefs repeated earnestly to you by your 10 year old...

He is of course entirely correct. However, on the off chance the 5 kids concerned did try and eat their grim slab of crusted dough, I didn't want to be responsible for making them sick. Plus it's nice to have something to show your parents, even if you did need a bit of a nudge (OK, a blatant replacement). I'm crossing my fingers for a better go next time.

When I saw the class in the playground the next day, they were all dying to tell me how they'd shared the bread and butter with their families and how their mums/dads/grans had pinched the biggest bits. It was lovely to see them so proud of themselves.

The bread was suffiently successful that several parents asked me for the recipe later. I feel pretty good about that -a nice result for my first attempt at a classroom activity.

As ever, I recommend getting Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's wonderful Family Cookbook, which is where I got the recipes. It really is a super book.

Bravado

"Sure, no problem."

I really shouldn't say these words. They are at the heart of several successful cake ranges I do, but it does send me into a right panic while I try to work out how to do whatever it is I blithely agreed to.

For example -

"I bet your scones are great, Jay - can you bring me some to try next week?" "Sure, no problem." Had I ever baked a scone in my life? No, reader, I had not. Nary a one. Cue a mad week of trialling everyone's scone recipes, taking them to the schoolyard and getting votes for the best, and then presenting the winner to my client. It is a damned fine scone recipe.

Early January - "What i really fancy are those cupcakes in pastel colours with that nice swirly icing that you see in London - can you bring me some next week to look at?" "Sure, no problem." Yikes - icing in a pretty way. I sucked at that. I swear to god it took me 5 minutes per cupcake to get that icing right. Nearly one year on, I blast through them in no time.

February - the birthday cake order that I thought was a plain buttercream vanilla sponge cake order turned out to be fondant with a dinosaur on it. "Oh, right. OK, no problem. "Argh! I made a total pig's ear out of it, covered the bad bit with frilly icing, and put the child's name on to distract from the rather, erm, rustic look. Tasted fabulous, though, and the client was very happy. I've offered her a discount this year if she wants another cake, to make up for being my guinea pig last year. I'm much better now...

Then, in the early autumn, a very nice woman said "Do you do Christmas cakes, Jay? I'd like to order a little one, if they aren't too expensive." "Sure, no problem," said Ms Never-Made-Fruit-Cake-But-How-Hard-Can-It-Be. That was a very expensive learning curve, but I am churning out lovely wee cakes at a terrific rate now.

"Can I get a 10 inch square sponge cake with piping on it and maybe some flowers?" "sure, no problem." So, mad dash to Harrogate to get the tins in Lakeland, and I am still working on the piping and the flowers. And I need to do a trial run of how big a vanilla sponge mix it takes to make a 10 square. I'm putting my faith in maths. An 8 inch round tin has an area of 50 square inches or thereabouts, so in theory the same depth of cake in a 10 inch square would need double quantities because it's 100 square inches.

Fingers crossed.

On the whole, my confidence in my ability to solve the problem before I need to deliver the cake has put me in good stead. I am now good at all sorts of cakes and baked goods I'd never tried before and my confidence has grown enormously. I still turn down my major area of fear (pastry) but i am determined to tackle that over the next fortnight by making my own mince pies. I made my first ever batch of mincemeat today, in preparation.

And this weekend I am making Key Lime Pie, in preparation for an order at New Year. It's in the oven now. The batter tasted lovely but I am fairly sure it will be one of those bothersome collapsing cakes.
I may be in for a very limey few weeks.

Baking for Beginners

This week I've been thinking about introducing non-bakers to the joys of baking.



On Wednesday I assisted Z's class in a cookery lesson. They're in Year 3, which means they are all 7 or 8 years old. Some clearly do food prep, baking, messing about in the kitchen at home quite a lot. Some have obviously never seen flour in their lives. It was an exciting morning.


The teacher seems a nice bloke. He's very keen on lots of hands-on activities, so they bake 6 times a year with a designated volunteer baker (guess who) and do loads of model building and stuff like that. I think it's great - I'm all for learning through doing, and learning through play.




We followed a recipe from the teacher. It's not the one I use, so I did a test run of it the night before, with B helping. She was a super test subject - we found out we need less milk than the recipe says, otherwise it was too sticky for her to work with. She was delighted with her scones - which she doesn't normally like - and she dished them out like an empress giving alms to the paupers. I do love that girl.


In class, I started by doing a quick talk about how to wash your hands properly. It's amazing how many people don't know how to do it. I only learnt as an adult, and I'm keen that the kids all know. Given the state of some of the grubby hands I saw heading to the sink, I'm glad I did or the scones would have been grey.

The kids worked in tables of 6 and shared out the tasks. That was so interesting to watch. Some tables rotated each task, some took dibs on the tasks they wanted, some had an individual with... how shall I put this... strong character dishing the jobs out to the other kids. Perhaps inevitably, one table went for arguing with each other and messing up each other's efforts. Ah well.

Teaching them to rub butter into the flour was good fun and resulted in a pretty substantial mess. I rather liked it.

The recipe (slightly tweaked after B's experience) was this -
340 g self raising flour
dash of salt
75g butter
75g sultanas
40g sugar
200ml milk
Rub flour, salt and butter together in a large bowl. Add the sultanas and sugar and stir. Add the milk and mix into a soft dough. Place on a lightly floured surface. Roll out to 1cm thick. (Some of the kids liked rolling so much they would have ended up with crispbreads had I not done a quick fix job before popping them in the over.) Cut out with a biscuit cutter, place on a greased baking sheet. Bake for 10 mins (I assume at 220C, like my own recipe)
They turned out OK - pretty good considering. Very pale because they didn't have an egg wash brushed across them, and thinner than I like, but not bad at all.
I'd prefer to use my usual recipe, which I'll also give you just in case anyone has a hankering for a home made scone -
500g plain flour
50g sugar
2 tsp bicarb
4 tsp cream of tartar (you find it on the shelf next to bicarb and baking powder in the shops)
75g butter
100g dried fruit of your preference (I like 80g sultanas and 20g dried cranberries)
300ml milk
1 egg, beaten
Preheat the oven to 220C. Sift the flour, sugar, bicarb and tartar together. Rub in the butter, stir in the fruit then add the milk and mix to a dough. Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead just enough to bring it to a nice dough. Don't bother rolling it, just pat it into shape - about an inch to an inch and a half thick. Use a cutter and just press it down - don't twist, it seals the edges and impedes the rising. Pop the scones onto a baking sheet and brush with beaten egg, bake for 10 mins then turn onto a wire rack to cool.
Crumbs, that's a long post. I stuff I was going to say about adult baking beginners, but it's getting late and I can always talk about that another day.
Must dash, those cakes won't bake themselves...