The first thing I actually made when I started my new baking kick was a Victoria sponge, with copious amounts of encouragement and some assistance from my hovering mother, occasionally snatching the spoon off me to stir herself, that sort of thing. I immediately began to grasp the cause of Lintu's resentment when other members of the family stray into her domain. Much later, I almost flew off the handle at Dad, making remarks about my baking despite his utter ineptitude at cooking himself. That wasn't a case of "too many cooks", it was a case of the dishwasher lecturing the sous chef. Baking isn't necessarily an exact science, although I have found myself staring like a lunatic through the oven door at rising cupcakes, complaining when lemon drizzle cake was still raw in the middle despite being in for the length of time noted in the recipe, and angrily squashing elderflower cupcakes that were far too wet and squishy because of an excess of cordial (my attempt to achieve that elusive fragrancing of elderflower in fairy cake sponge, gone horribly wrong.) Making cake is much quicker than I expected it to be; bread such a long process that the only reason it is worth all the fuss is that the bread I turn out of the oven is far superior to the soft-crusted bird-feed that comes out of the bread maker.
This recipe for shortbread, which belongs to that marvellously personable cook Lorraine Pascale ("Baking Made Easy"), is the one that Mum swears by. So do I. It's rich and buttery, just as shortbread should be. You do have to pick up and press the mixture together when you've combined all your ingredients, packing it into a rough ball before you put it into the bottom of a cake tin and smooth it out - otherwise it's just crumbs - but it produces divine shortbread. Shortbread is one of those things that no one should live without. I ate far too much of it in Glasgow, my go-to biscuit when I'd gotten bored of eating as many bourbon biscuits as I pleased (ha ha Mum!) before it was replaced with inexplicable eclair cravings. Fortunately for my waistline, I'm not much fatter than I am because Sainsbury's on Buchanan Street stopped stocking the pre-cooked chilled pancakes after my first year. That's another thing that's difficult about my new interest in baking: balancing sudden consumption of cake with the dieting designed to reduce my jiggling middle.
Ingredients
130g butter, softened a few seconds in microwave
60g caster sugar (plus extra for sprinkling)
130g plain flour
60g rice flour
A pinch of salt
Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl until pale and fluffy. Add the plain flour, rice flour and salt, and stir well until the mixture is smooth and uniform. (I find it easiest to keep pressing the mixture against the side of the bowl to mix it.) Make sure all big lumps of butter are broken up and smoothed into the crumbly shortbread mixture. Bring the mixture together and press into a cake tin (20cm / 8in), smoothing it with the back of a spoon. Crimp the edges by pressing with the tips of two fingers, then score into eight pieces with a knife and prick each triangle three times with a fork. Put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees. Remove the shortbread from the fridge and bake in the oven for 30-35 minutes, or until pale golden-brown. Remove the shortbread from the oven and sprinkle over some caster sugar. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before removing it from the tin and cooling on a wire rack.
I'm not at the moment very interested in cooking. Making meals is kind of dull; I want to make cakes and biscuits, the prettier the better. For the time being, the entries in this blog are going to be about making cakes and biscuits, with several repetitions as I try out new variations on the standard cupcake/fairy cake, and then report how it all went horribly wrong. Stay tuned.
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