Moving

Don't moan... I've been moving house, and it's wasn't a very nice move, so sorry for not blogging recently but you'll just have to live with it..... like I have.


The kitchen is nearly sorted and I'm raring to go!

Slight inconvenience

Things are not going as planned at the moment. My landlady has decided to sell our home and I've got to move in 3 weeks.

The good news is I've found a nicer flat, a bigger flat and the kitchen is amazing. I never mentioned it before but I hate my current kitchen. I mean it's all new and nicely decorated but it's small, there are only 4 available sockets and it's been fitted with the cheapest appliances on the market. The Becko washing machine is ok, and so is the Fridgidaire, but the Matsui dishwasher annoys me and the Belling electric cooker/ oven (no fan) is not worth me wasting valuable blogging space.

The new kitchen has a gas hob and a fan oven. BINGO! Best of both worlds.

The previously mentioned Belling oven has kind of prevented me from really experimenting, but my other half did buy me a stand mixer a little while back so I have done a couple of loafs (which the stupid oven burnt), and Pete has made a fruit cake which is in a box under the bed being force fed copious amounts of alcohol until we can bear it no more and will have to eat it!

KMix

Here is the new love of my life. My new Kenwood KMix. It does everything I could ask for except cook dinner. The attachments available are few and far between at the moment, but it's a new model and I'm sure there will be more released in the future. It's far more iconic and beautiful than the KitchenAid Artisan (which everyone seems to have nowadays). It was also modelled on the original Kenwood Chef as designed and produced in England by Mr Kenneth Wood himself. Eat that KitchenAid! Now gorge yourself in some lovely photos and a video.

Kenwood Chef. Circa 1950

Nanas know best

I was lucky enough to grow up with my immediate family living close by. My Nanny and Grandad lived in the next street and my Grandma and Grandpop lived just down the road.

When I wasn’t at home (which wasn’t often) I would be at one of my grandparents. As my Nan’s house was on the way home from school, I was usually there. In fact, I was there so often that I would hide behind my Nan’s kitchen door when my granddad came home from work, and when he entered the house you could hear him grumbling “is he here again?”

I don’t think he meant it.... most of the time, but now I’m older I can fully understand if he did.

Anyway, I’m at my Nan’s. By day she works as a cook at the local village hospital. By afternoon, she’s a baker. She bakes cakes. Proper cakes. Wedding cakes, birthday cakes and celebration cakes. She uses royal icing applied in layers with a spirit level and the bumps removed with sand paper; none of the ‘just roll’ icing that’s used today. She makes fondant flowers and leaves, chocolate curls and coloured coconut. As grandchildren, we got to choose which birthday cake we wanted her to make.

Being at Nan’s was a watch-don’t-eat situation. I’d wait patiently in the corner watching and waiting for the coveted bowl and “whiskers” to lick while the next layer was added to the wedding cake that she was creating. She didn’t make the cakes as a business but something she’d do for a friend of a friend of a friend so it was more of an education than a learning curve, but something I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at some day.

Grandmas on the other hand was a totally different experience. Baking was for fun and we ate whatever we had made as soon as it was cool enough not to burn our mouths. There was very little if any left when grandpops came home from his allotment with his woolly pom-pom hat on. Biscuits, cakes, scones and sweets were all on the menu here.

I remember I had a cook book at Grans for children. One of the recipes was for honeycomb. Heating a saucepan of sugar until it was as hot as lava, then adding bicarb of soda so that the boiling hot lava foamed up and nearly escaped the pan, then carefully pouring it into a baking tray to cool before bashing it up with a hammer. All this from a children’s cook book. Health and safety hadn’t been invented yet, neither had salmonella. More bowls and whiskers of raw ingredient for me and Gran to lick then!

Gran taught me a very important lesson in that there is no point eating healthy food if you don’t enjoy it. If you want a proper dinner then it has to be meat and two veg with proper gravy, or a proper roast with all the trimmings or homemade chips cooked in hot lard... All in consideration of course, and none of this convenience rubbish that is available today. Gran was however, surprisingly partial to a Chinese take away every now and then.

Sadly they have now gone to a greater place and they are missed dearly but I am going to try and carry on the traditions of bakers in my family.

The black sheep

So, I’m the black sheep of the family in that I can’t cook. Well, that’s not exactly strictly true. I can knock up a casserole or a curry or a roast, but nothing special. Both my brothers are excellent cooks in the savoury department usually Thai themed. So is my mum. The trouble is I have a bad memory and timing issues, and I’ve found that when something savoury goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Just the other day I forced myself to eat soup that I’d made which really was quite terrible!

I do however have a friend in the kitchen – The slow cooker, in which case nothing can go wrong (usually), timing issues are irrelevant and whatever you throw in it usually comes out good. The slow cooker is my friend.

Just recently I’ve been following a couple of TV programs and blogs on the web about baking. “The great British bake off” where Ed Kimber, who in a nut shell, worked in an office in an uninspiring job, gave up his career to follow his dream, entered the great British bake off and won. The runner up, Ruth Clemens is a manic mum with kitchen girl-power! You might like to check them out at He-eats and The pink whisk.

At school in home economics, given the choice I would be baking. At college, I would always be making bread rolls or deserts, so why when I left college and abandoned my catering career did I give up baking?.... I remember now. I was too busy being busy.

So what has ignited this interest in baking again? Rubbish on tv I think! Sometimes I can spend a whole night flicking through channels of rubbish wishing I had something more interesting to do. I needed a hobby that could keep me interested for a couple of hours. So Inspired to do something different, I got my mixing bowl out.