White Cake with White Chocolate Buttercream

I absolutely love the Magnolia Bakery cookery book. Never mind that I can't work out the measurements which are all in American. Actually most of this was solved for me by a gift from a friend - two fridge magnets, one with a set of US-UK liquid conversions, and the other for solids. Yay. I am sorted. The Magnolia Bakery cookery book contains some of the most indulgent cakes I have ever baked, and I have baked a fair few. In fact, though I can't rival the Great British Bake Off for consistency I could run rings around the lot of them in sheer volume. To give you an idea, at home my family, and there are only four of us in total, are chomping our way through chocolate whoopie pies, a white chocolate cheesecake dotted with raspberries, and a white cake with white chocolate buttercream icing. Why is it called white cake, one of my kids asks. It's so obviously white that its name seems like a let down. It's not a let down, I explain. It is understatement. The Magnolia Bakery's white cake is a huge effort. It involves ages and ages of whisking and electric mixing to get exactly the right ratio of air bubbles to mixture. Whisked egg white has to be combined exactly right so that when the two sponge cakes rise, they are light and frothy. But the true seriousness of the task lies in the buttercream. And what a heart stopper it is. Three bars of white chocolate and two whole packs of butter, whisked and whisked and whisked, with vanilla essence and a pack of icing sugar, slathered over one cake base, plonk the other one on top, and then slather again. This cake is so rich that, with one slice down you, it's no food for a week as your body recovers from the shock. It is the attrition of all foods. It is, therefore, the perfect special occasion cake. In the past month I have celebrated two 50th birthdays of people I love, and have made this cake both times, covering it with gold glitter to symbolise 50 years. Actually what it did was to give the cake a distinctly 70s, camp, Abba look. It's so shimmery!  Only to be eaten wearing platform leather boots and flares. But I also made it for a 10th birthday decorated with delicate violet flowers, and I made it for the sheer hell of it one Sunday and covered it with chocolate buttons. White cake. It is baking's blank canvas. Go buy the book.

Olympics Fashion Statement Dilemma

OK so it is true. In the midst of economic gloom and spiralling conflict in Syria, the UK has officially gone Olympics mad and I raise my hand to admit to beine one of the millions to be sucked into the hype. Like many other Brits I tuned into the opening ceremony with a tight feeling in my chest and the all too familiar feeling of impending doom and humiliation, the same feeling as I get every year when I tune into Wimbledon tennis. I have some international travel coming up as part of my job and I imagined myself telling people I met that I was Norwegian. But, minutes into the opening ceremony the seemingly impossible happened and it began to be abundantly clear that Danny-oh was going to deliver a corker. A brilliant mixture of heritage, culture and humour, an unsurpassable portrayal of the quintessientially British characteristic - taking the piss out of yourself. What other nation could put their world class, top famous orchestra up there to play, beautifully, a classic piece like the theme from Chariots of Fire, and then plonk a comedian on a synthesiser as accompaniment? A triumph of Britishness. I began to sat up and take more of an interest in the tickets we have coming up next week for one of the sporting events. Having worked out what it was (swimming) and how we were going to get there (car, tube, walk and queue), the next important thing was, what to wear. A serious fashion dilemma. Leaving aside the fact that I would be going there from work and would therefore absolutely have to change - no way was I heading for the Aquatic Centre in the uniform of Civil Servantry - and that security restrictions meant one bag only per person, which for me would mean changing at work and dumping all my belongings in my flimsily locked side drawer - the question was, did I want to reflect sport luxe (no idea what that really is but it sounds posher than just a pair of shorts, t shirt and a bum bag), did I want to turn up in palazzo pants and a silk bustier looking like I'd turned up for a VIP reception, or did I want to go totally utilitarian? On top of this I have the ongoing footwear dilemma, that my reconstructed foot remains a size and a half larger than my healthy one, which means I can only lever it into outsize walking shoes or my biker boots. Nightmare. Well if there is any one criterion more important than any other, it is, to look like a local. To be able to saunter through the Olympic Park radiating messages like, these are MY games! I PAID for these! They REPRESENT me! Yah boo sucks to Beijing! But to be able to achieve this without draping a Union Jack over me seems like an awesome challenge. I think the answer probably lies somewhere in Stella McCartney for Adidas. Sporty but cute. Healthy but incidentally so. British, but untacky. OK. Point me to the Adidas website asap.

I am a packhorse

When I had reconstructive surgery on my foot, I took stock for the very first time of what I took to work. On crutches, there is a very serious limit to what you can bring in with you, and for the 6 weeks when I was in my surgical boot and taking cabs from home to office and back, I made a very good fist of restricting myself to a small backpack containing the bare essentials. Of course, we are talking FEMALE bare essentials, which in my case included, lunch (economy sized bag of crudites, wheat free sandwich, half fat yogurt and five litres of water), a lipstick, another lipstick in case I wasn't in the mood for the first one, my home phone, my work phone, my front door keys, my side gate key in case I lost my front door keys...you get the picture.

But once out of my surgical boot it was a matter of just a few days before I was back to my old packhorse habits. So yesterday I emptied the entire contents of the two bags I take regularly to work to see what it is I find so important that I cannot leave it behind. And I discovered that it is not that I take a lot of useless clutter with me. It is that I commute like a nomad. I carry essentials with me for every possible variation of the day. And when I look around the tube I can see to my amusement that I'm not the only one. Women across London are all at it. We all appear to be wearing running shoes, so that if our train breaks down in the tunnel we won't ruin our work shoes as we pick our way through the rats and the soot to the next station. We carry food because in these economic times who can afford to buy their lunch from Pret? We carry our gym gear because apparently we can still afford the gym even if we can't afford food. With gym gear comes a complete set of toiletries and make up so that we can emerge from the gym looking as if we spent the last hour in a spa and not in legs, bums 'n' tums. We carry our laptop, because we work 24/7 around our various domestic responsibilities to catch up with our email. Then there are the various mobile phones - the work one, the home one, and the spare one for use if either of the other two break. There are our tea time snacks to stop us going out on a chocolate binge, our IPad, MP3 for listening to motivating music on the last mile of the commute that we will complete on foot, and a host of medication - three different analgesics, emergency hand and face care, reams and reams of tissues, and two different perfumes - one for the office, and a heavier one for if we think we have a hot date that evening. I stare at it all in disbelief. No wonder the ligaments in my foot started snapping from the strain. What my surgeon should have done, isntead of rebuilding my foot the way it used to be, was to have attached a horseshoe to it.

Department store rebellion

I have a problem with department stores. Intrinsically, I loathe shopping in them. Department stores are places I go to when I have to buy something that I think would be easiest to purchase in a department store. These, with very few exceptions, are items in which I have no joy at all in the purchase. The list includes things like kettles, mens' socks, duvet covers, towels, ready-to-hang curtains, random lightbulbs, seat cushions, and presents for people with whom I have nothing in common.  Occasionally, very occasionally, I am drawn to the oddly conceived chocolate area in John Lewis, located between the photo frames and the light hangings. Or I find myself in the shoe section at Fenwick. Or the watch and accessory bar in Debenhams. I don't want anything they have to offer, indeed I find myself picking up a Calvin Klein shoe or a Radlett bag in Fenwick, thinking simultaneously, why am I doing this? I don't need shoes. I loathe Radlett bags. I'm not even on the right floor of the department store for the thing I came in for. And who on earth wanders into John Lewis to spend twenty quid on an outsized jar of Montezuma chocolate buttons? But that's the clever marketing set up of the stores. You catch a colour, a light, a suggestion of something, and before you know it you are up to your ears in haberdashery or Spanx underwear. Such underhand tactics bring out my most rebellious spirit. It makes me do things like walk in wearing dark sunglasses, so I won't be caught by the bright lights and colours. Of course what it actually does is make me look like a random thief or a bag bomber, which means I end up making my necessary purchase tailed by highly conspicuous store detectives, and that's no good either. What I want is to walk in exuding nonchalant self confidence, I want to radar the message, I am only in here for your Egyptian cotton fitted sheets!  Nothing will make me divert to the Hunter wellies, the Nails Inc nail bar, the special purchase sofas or the Krispy Kremes! Seriously, there is a bit of an issue about department stores trying to be all things to all people. The number of times I've ducked into one of these places looking for a swimsuit, only to find that they have several types of Croc shoe in only three sizes, gold metallic bikinis for 8 year old girls, and if you rummage really really determinedly you may find a dusty Speedo one piece circa 1982, size 10 or size 22. I guess my problem is that I am fundamentally anti the proposition of the department store, which is, don't come in with any objective in  mind. Just visit us! Like you would a school fair or a church jumble sale or an old peoples' home Open Day! So I'm obviously not their target market because I don't do any of those things. I am the person who leaps on her bike (now I have two working feet and can finally do so) when I have the odd hour spared from my endless baking, and if I were to drop in anywhere it would probably be, I am not ashamed to say, a local farmer's market, an intriguing looking newly opened boutique, or a non-franchise bakery. In other words I like to go to places where the proposition is that you can only buy one thing - a type of food, a type of clothing - and it has to fit into the bicycle basket. There is only one answer to this, and thank goodness I recently discovered it. Shop online. A trauma free way to make my rebellious statements. Click on sheets. Click on pay. And click on the button that says, deliver to my house exactly what I ordered and don't even think of trying to sell me picnicware. Result.

Boris bikes and skirts

I work for the government, and with the looming approach of the Olympics I have been pondering government advice to rethink my travel plans in view of the impending arrival of millions of tourists who will colonise the tube, take over my dentist's surgery and GP clinic, swarm through my local supermarket and generally get in the way of every conceivable daily routine. Well, with the closure of St James' Park for the beach volleyball in Horseguards Parade I have already been experiencing a modicum of inconvenience - no more early morning stroll by the cantankerous swans, now it's a trudge up the concrete jungle of Whitehall with an extra 20 minutes of walk thrown in for good measure. Bummer, particularly for my newly reconstructed foot, which has been protesting with increased bolshieness at the overtime being demanded of it. But this week I've begun to think more radically about how I can avoid the stations I need to get in and out of as part of my commute and this has brought me to the Boris Bike. I am hugely in favour of the Boris Bike. I first saw their equivalent in Paris and the first time I saw someone on one my jaw dropped in awe and admiration. She was an attractive young woman, sailing through the Marais wearing a beautifully cut cape, high heels and jodphur jeans, and her designer handbag perched obediently in the cleverly designed space between handlebars and wheel. I want to look like that, I thought at the time. Get me to a Sephora, and then find me a hybrid that I can coast over the cobbled roads on, adding to the picturesque. Move on a year and I am contemplating the row of blue bikes, thinking, not for the first time in my life, isn't it amazing how huge the distance is between fantasy and reality. Firstly, I wear skirts and dresses to work, and the minute I climb on to one of those bikes it's going to be all about managing wardrobe malfunctions and diverting attention away from my lumberjack legs. Secondly, I travel with multiple bags. My gym bag full of kit, my workbag with its cumbersome government issue laptop, and whatever receptacle I currently have for my daily intake of food. Boris bikes have room for just the one decorous designer bag and otherwise you're on your own. And finally, what about helmets? - or is there something about the Boris bike that makes it impossible for you to be knocked off while cycling gaily down some of London's busiest roads with its worst tempered drivers? I am Not Convinced. I love the idea of alighting at Camden, pulling out a Boris bike, navigating my way gaily through the centre of town, my beautiful red Summer dress wafting in the breeze, just enough to show some leg but not so much as to make me look like a wind up walking pomegranate, drawing admiring looks as I coast past restaurants and historic landmarks en route through Green Park to Victoria. But I know this is never going to happen. What will happen is, that it will pour, I will get soaked, I will need to bring a change of clothing to facilitate the downpour, which means I will have four bags not three, most of which will teeter precariously off the handles, while I stop every few seconds to tug my dress, which has ridden ingloriously up to my bottom, vainly back over my knees. By the time I reach my destination I will probably be crying for my Mother. No. It's a great idea Mr Johnson, but there are only two answers to this. Buy hiking boots and walk the route. Or stay at home and hope nobody notices.

Doing your face on the tube

By and large, I am unimaginative when it comes to make up. Though every so often I have a blow out at Bobbi Brown or I'm tempted by some candy coloured product at Clinique or Shu Uemura (is that how you spell it??), mostly my make up application regime takes me all of 5 minutes, which would be comical for others if they watched me do it, except that I would never let them. I slap it all on, grab my bag and go. So I always react with consistently unfeigned horror when I find myself sat opposite a woman in the tube who has elected to bring the entire contents of her boudoir with her so she can spend her commute applying it all minutely and obsessively to her face. For me, applying make up on the tube is right down there with eating burgers on the tube, and snogging on the tube. These are things people love to do, that need to be confined to their homes, because all of these behaviours are revolting for others to have to witness, and in a sardine can of a tube carriage, it's not like we have much choice in the matter.  Today's guest star of the Commuter Make Up School was a wannabee rocker, complete with frayed pink skirt that barely came below her bum cheeks, torn black tights, glittery cutaway top, blue and white hair, and goth earrings. She looked to be in her mid thirties and so huge was her make up bag that she struggled to extricate it from her Marc Jacobs from Debenhams black and pink shopper (how do I know it was a Marc Jacobs creation? His name was ALL OVER it. This is another fashion statement I fail to understand. Why would I want to carry a bag with someone else's name scrawled all over it??) With covert, revolted fascination I watched this woman with one eye while the other read the Times online on my IPad. The amazing grossness of commuter make up appliers lies in the behavioural quirk that makes it possible for them to squeeze blackheads, trim eyebrows, curl lashes and even dye their moustaches, with total insouciance. This one was no exception. A woman with many breakouts, probably due to all the make up she cakes on her face, she spent around 4 tube stops excavating them. Another 4 tube stops covering up each spot, obsessively, with some evil looking green gloop. Then she applied foundation in a thick liquid using a brush that went over her face at least five times. Then powder. Lots of it. Then blusher. Then four types of eyeshadow. Then I had to get off the tube. Luckily it was my stop but if it weren't I might have had to get off anyway, to find somewhere to throw up.You pretty much never see women doing the sort of make up touch up in the tube that magazines exhort you to have the kit ready to do - a quick dab of lipstick, a smart brush of blusher, a stroke of highlighter to freshen your complexion before your night begins or en route to that important meeting or job interview. You only ever see women applying make up on the tube who slap it on like clowns. Maybe it's a pastime. I do the crossword. She does a full make up. I read the paper. She applies false nails. I review my travel documents. She sharpens her eyelash curler.

Exercise and rage

A week or two ago I went swimming. I am a regular swimmer and usually the best way to describe my style would be, solid. I don't achieve much by way of speed, but you could leave me there for hours and I will still be going strong. I have a sort of world weary stamina that keeps me doing stroke after stroke after stroke. Some years back I used to do the BT swimathon regularly. This is a sponsored swim where you have to achieve 200 lengths. The first year I did it, I was in a group of five, who did 40 lengths each. The second year I did it, I split it 50 50 with my flatmate. The third year I did it, she and I competed against each other in the same lane, doing the whole 200. After a few years and a lot of work related stress I switched to boxing and never looked back. Nothing does it for my aggression quite like learning how to smash someone in the jugular with accuracy. But after my various orthopaedic injuries it became clear that boxing was never going to be my thing again, and back to the pool I went. I have relearned humility in the pool - I have had two operations in the last two years, one of them major, and after both I have kickstarted my rehab with slow limping walks up and down the length of the pool, progressing painfully to a measured front crawl, which oh joy oh joy after a few weeks would morph into fluid lengths of sheer unadulterated mobility. Recently, a gym injury I sustained courtesy of a wet floor in the cardio area for which my stupid gym has accepted full responsibility, has sent me back to the pool, tail between my legs. But when I got in the pool a week or two ago, which is where my story really starts, I was fuelled by something other than the usual need to keep up my health, no matter how nebulous the means. I climbed into the pool (an achievement by itself, actually - three months ago I was using the steps, and three months before that it was the disabled chair. May the saints preserve you from having to ask at reception for help with the disabled chair, then wait for half an hour for someone to turn up to winch you down in it. Frankly the humiliation of being stared at by people who are clearly wondering whether you need this kind of help is just because you are a bit too fat, is enough to send me to the maxi pack of Walkers crisps the second I get back home). Anyway, I climbed into the pool, took a deep breath, and swam. Eighty lengths of front crawl, without stopping. As I swam, each time I approached the end of another length, my usual impulse - stop, take some breaths - was replaced by a completely new voice, yelling obdurately inside my brain, no! Keep going, keep going, keep going. When I finally did stop, I was elated. Eighty lengths, no stopping, tumble turn at each end - I had never achieved that in all my years of active and regular exercise. Where had it come from? I thought about how I had been feeling while I was swimming. I had been angry. That was it. I had rage oozing from every pore, screaming inside my head, powering my muscles and creating an adrenalin that became the dominant force, refusing to acknowledge fatigue or the usual protective override that says, don't use up all your energy reserves right now, you have a day to get through that includes working, doing the washing, ironing, and running after your kids. And as a result I discovered I was capable of pushing myself far, far harder than I ever had before. I knew where this rage had come from. It wasn't the usual response to work stress or a need to get out. I was working off weeks of pent up helpless, impotent rage that came from my inability to do anything about the crippling appallingness of the medical treatment that a relative I loved deeply was having to put herself through. I wondered if this was what Olympic athletes did - summon from within themselves an aggression that would be completely unacceptable to display in the normal course of daily life - and harness its full potential to perform way beyond what their normal mental impulses would allow them to achieve. The hilarious thing about this is, that while this is the first time I had experienced this while exercising (though not the last - I have repeated the non stop 80 length session three times since then, drawing on the memory of the same rage), I have experienced it countless times while baking. Seriously. The impulse that flicks on like a light switch in my head when I walk into the kitchen, even when I am tired or busy or distracted, that says, MUST BAKE A CAKE RIGHT NOW! comes from the same place in my head, and when it results, 3 or 4 hours later, in a kitchen table laden with confectionery heaven, the drive to mix and stir and sieve and decorate, rather than put the kettle on, open the Hob Nobs and draw up a chair in front of the Times crossword, it is pushing my stamina to higher limits in exactly the same way as the eighty length sprint. The obvious difference is that if I used it more to swim and less to bake we would all be a lot healthier, not just me. But it also shows that my baking has never been about eating the cake. It has been about the channelling of bad energy into good, by making something beautiful. And the feeling I experience when I finish my marathon swim, is less about reaching my healthy goals, and more about achieving a milestone. Both these things - creating something beautiful, and reaching an exercise milestone - give me a sense of control over myself. And that makes sense doesn't it? The rage comes from the inability to control something terrible happening to someone I love. So I challenge myself to produce something that says, you can't control that. But you can control this. It restores balance, if only for a very, very short while. So. All I need is to have someone on standby to enrage me so that I can achieve my fantasy goal of swimming the Channel. I might see if I can find that bloke in a white van who cut me up so flagrantly on the North Circular Road last weekend. He would be the perfect candidate.

Gym addicts and birthday cakes

I've been going to the gym a lot lately. Like, six days a week. Part of it has to do with enthusiasm fuelled by an opportunistic spot of weight loss (female fact: if you lose weight, you suddenly want to exercise so you can get EVEN THINNER. If you don't lose weight you have no desire to exercise at all, based on how flabby you feel as you stumble off the cross trainer. Intellectually illogical, but emotionally it makes perfect sense to all women). Part of it has to do with bloody minded determination to get my new foot working as well as it can, and to beat all previous records for post-foot reconstruction-rehabilitation. This latter motivation has been a major mistake as overwork in the gym has inflamed my anchor stitch (don't ask) making my newly realigned heel almost impossible to walk on, which in the words of my unsympathetic GP and a good proportion of my exasperated friends, Serves Me Right. Anyway. The more you go to the gym, the more you tap into the community of weird people who like to be there. I hate to be there myself. I've already ranted in this blog about the effect of global warming on my ability to realise my desire of bootcamp on Hampstead Heath. The amount of rain we've had, it'd be more like bootcamp on Hampstead Bog, followed by months of treatment for foot rot, and I'm just not that hard core. So, gym it is. And there are lots of people there who either genuinely love it there, or they are gym addicts, or they have no friends. I kind of suspect at least two of those three reasons are linked. Around me I see unconscionably slender women dressed head to do in black spandex, manipulating the cross trainer with feverish intensity while reading a back copy of Hello! and swapping fashion tips into their Blackberries. In the weights room seriously over-muscled men vie with each other to pick up the heaviest weight, and then, much more importantly, make the loudest noise, with the weight, with their mouths, and I'm afraid also with their bums (sudden unclenching has a very unfortunate consequence) when they thump the weight back on the floor. These are people who have quite obviously been there for a while before I pitched up for my decorous workout, and by the time I have finished an hour later, are no closer to looking like they have any intention of leaving. Maybe at the end of the day they simply collapse with exhaustion on a training mat, then wake up again the next morning still in the chest fly position on the weights bench, peel themselves off, and start again. Me, I have other fish to fry, or more accurately, cakes to bake.  Three birthday cakes, to be exact, two for fitftieth birthdays and one for a soon-to-be twelve year old boy. Now I am not a particularly creative birthday cake baker. If you want a cake in the shape of a computer, or a guitar, or a football, or frankly anything that isn't your good old fashioned flat circle, I am not your woman. My creativity is in the toppings. I have two drawerfuls of decoration and after I've made my white cake and slathered it with white chocolate buttercream - or I've made my chocolate sourcream and covered it with dark chocolate ganache - or I've made my mudcake etc etc - you get the gist right? - yummy sponge with to-die-for icing - I pull out my haul of decorations and I agonise over them, matching them to the occasion. Fifty years is golden, so I'm off to Harvey Nicks to spend a ridiculous amount of money on their edible gold icing. Easy peasy. A white cake with gold icing will look kind of camp, and utterly delicious. My birthday cakes for kids are usually covered with Maltesers, chocolate buttons, M&Ms and pieces of fudge. Oh yes, there is no either/or. It's the whole caboodle, to the endless delight of the kids who snarf it down. It's only recently that I have discovered finesse in decorating cakes, hence my possession of soft red glitter, violet flowers, yellow marzipan baby birds, and spun sugar dolls. I'm tempted to make a batch of cup cakes, top them with my richest frosting, scatter my decorations variously over each one, take them to the gym and hand them out to all the Hello! perusing stick insects, in an altruistic effort to encourage them to Get A Life.