The right baking kit

OK it's true. I was one of those people who, years ago, rushed out to buy Delia's latest cookery book, read through the first few pages which detailed what exactly you needed in your larder to be a committed cook, ran out and bought it all, suffused with guilt at the prospect of Not Being A Serious Cook. Fast forward five years and most of that stuff was mouldering away at the back of my overstuffed food cupboard. Because you see, to be able to be in constant supply of nigella seeds, among other things, you need to be someone who actually has a Larder. Which I didn't at the time, still don't, and probably never will. Should anything approximating a larder ever become available in the vicinity of my kitchen it will almost certainly find itself instantly and ignominiously stuffed with bikes, mops, muddy wellies and old jam jars. Thus it is in my home: a whole room just for food feels somehow spurious. Gluttonous. Excessive. Even for food in a kitchen. Besides, where would the mops go?

But I am a serious baker and the better I get, the better hardware I like to use. I'm not particularly precious about the type of chocolate I melt - I get that Valrhona is going to possess a sheen that Cadbury's fruit and nut is never going to attain in a month of Sundays etc. But I also get that when I make Rocky Road, the people who scoff it won't give a monkey's what chocolate I used, as Rocky Road is the kind of thing that will disappear in seconds no matter what you use to make it. But I do draw the line at an electric mixer that takes ages to whip up egg white into a meringue base when a better piece of kit will not only achieve this in seconds, it will be sheer fun to do it. So when my electric hand mixer started to make weird noises after about 8  years of honourable service, I headed to the Boxing Day sales. It was Time to fork out serious cash for the right mixer. I came back some hours later, flushed, dishevelled but victorious, with a Kitchen Aid model. The only other piece of Kitchen Aid kit I have in my kitchen is the standalone mixer, which cost hundreds, was a birthday present from my parents who got sick of me talking endlessly about the silver model, and I absolutely love not just its efficacy, or even its look, but the fabulously productive sound it makes as it mixes. Let's be clear - baking is about ALL the senses. Not just how things taste, smell or look, but how the whole process sounds. So the second I got home I unwrapped my mixer with its attachments, fixed on the balloon whisk, pressed the on button, tried out every one of the nine (nine!!) speed settings, and listened to each one. A gloriously even, hardworking hummmmm. Oh boy. I am going to love using this baby. Meringues for dinner tonight.

Croissants

I was doing a Q and A with my team the other day. A very brave one, in fact - one where no holds were barred, and staff were encouraged to ask whatever they wanted, and, leaving aside uncrossable barriers that was pretty much what they did. And the first question? Baking. Would I please share a baking secret. I said to them: if you don't have a passion for baking, you're never really going to get it right. Every cake, biscuit, tart, loaf I make, has joy in it.  Every time I go into the kitchen, it's an emotional release to pull out the flour and start sieving it. Where others might head for a bottle of wine after work, I head for my apron. Most looked at me uncomprehendingly, as well they might. And I reflected afterwards, that since I do all of my baking alone - unlike spas or shopping, it never occurs to me to invite a mate over to bake a Victoria sponge with - I have no idea, really, how others think about their baking. Perhaps this all seems a bit geeky and kind of sad. Well. This week I had my chance to find out whether others thought about baking the way I did. I've got myself pretty good at baking bread - I graduated from sourdough some time ago to more complex processes involving fresh yeast for a slower fermenting process, or understanding different grades of vinegar, or even saving the juice out of pickled cucumbers to add to a rye and black olive bread mix. But I haven't got up the courage to attempt a croissant. I look on in awe when people do this - rolling thing - effortlessly on foodie programmes. It has for some time sat firmly in the box labelled Too Advanced Even For Me. But recently I came across a cookery school offering a three hour session to learn how to make croissants. Irresistible. I signed up, and yesterday I turned up there. Borough Market, right at the back, in a long studio with a big, wooden table with stools around it, and white aprons folded at each station, with a rolling pin - large, Scandanavian, beech affair - and a bowl, digital measuring scales and flour - and 11 other people. And I realise I am about to enter Baking Nirvana. I have never, ever baked with other people. It reminded me of the first time I sat an exam at university in a hall with boys in it. I went to a girls only school for so many years that I couldn't concentrate for the first half hour of my first exam paper because the vibe was so different, just because boys were in the hall. And this was, well, just weird having bakers on either side of me. But also, just, so, well, wonderful. How long have you been baking, one asks me. I tell him, and we discuss how we got started, and just a few seconds later we are talking sourdough as if we have known each other for years. Our teacher works supportively, humorously and combatively with us for the next three hours, teaching us to roll out croissant dough, pile up the butter, fold the dough over it, chill, roll it out, fold it over, chill...the time whizzes past. I am delirious with the sheer happiness of being among people as passionate and geeky about this as I am. Each wants to get the perfect roll on their croissant shape, the right height, the right number of layers, the right crispiness outside versus the right buttery softness inside. We swap tips, we remind each other of the process, we comment on each others' dough texture. And we stuff our faces with the fruits of the teacher's labour - pain au chocolate, pain au raisin. When our croissants are ready, and how incredible they look! - perfect, even if they are not evenly sized enough to qualify for a Bake Off award, I pile them carefully into a box and drift off to the tube to catch my train home. I sit on the Northern Line in a haze of goodwill. Mmm, who's got croissants, a commuter says. I do, I cry, and I BAKED them. Myself!!! The carriage oohs and aaahs - supportively, I like to think, though in retrospect I imagine they thought if they applauded me and massaged my ego for long enough I would buckle and hand them all out (I didn't.  I might have been high on my achievement but I am not an idiot). And when I got home, complete with the cookery school's baking book, which I threw open at the Jammie Dodger page and got busy IMMEDIATELY, I felt like I'd just conquered Everest. It's just croissants right? Nope. If you have a passion for baking, turning out 13 beautiful croissants is so, so much more than making the family dinner. Right now, it feels like a lifetime achievement. That's the passion talking.

Pelvic Floor Exercises

I am making a tomato soup. One of those sumptuous ones with a million tomatoes, puree, bit of chilli, touch of mascarpone, basil, splash of wine...the works. I feel as if I deserve it. I've just shlepped round the West End with one of my kids, buying clothes. Said child is at the age of rejecting any of my suggestions on the grounds that even if my taste is impeccable, rebellion is the order of the day. Important at this time to maintain mental distance. Kid picks up horrible t shirt: "Of course!! Whatever you want luv...You get the picture. With mental detachment achieved, it is a not unsuccessful shopping trip - I now need a second mortgage on the house, but Child is equipped for fashion and practicability so it's a win win. But we're both whacked, and both also more than a bit resentful that having deliberately not travelled in the rush hour, we find ourselves in the Unofficial Rush Hour, i.e. the entire day between 9 and 4, when tourists and truants alike take to the tube in their droves. By the time we are back in the 'burbs, we are in need of comforting sustenance. And in this weather, it's soup. And bread. The great thing about making both of these, is that they are, generally speaking, slow and steady procedures. Plenty of time to think. I reflect on the tube ride as I pound my dough, then plait it up and leave it for its second proving. I was reading an article on the tube about how implacable faces are. How little you can tell of what a person is thinking. I'm not too sure about that. I'm close to certain - I would lay my money on it, in fact if I had any left after the shopping spree - that the woman opposite me was doing her pelvic floor exercises. Something about the way she was twitching her hips, ever so slightly, and screwing up her mouth, a lot less slightly. Level one...level two...level THREE. No idea what I'm talking about? Try having a baby. Or nine, in the case of Queen Victoria, which is a less random example than it sounds, as we also know of Queen V that she had a prolapsed uterus, something very common in women who have had quite a few pregnancies. And I'll bet her poor doctor, who was often not allowed to touch her when he examined her, was completely unable to teach her the Elevator Technique. It's an absolute must for women who do not want to be in daily need of Sanpro (or Monthly Care, as Boots so hilariously now calls it) for the rest of their post menopausal lives. This is taught efficiently by GPs, nurses and sex counsellors alike. What they don't tell you, is how to master your facial expression while you are at it. So those GPs who fondly imagine that all their midlife female patients are on the tube quietly getting on with progressing from Floor 2 to Floor 3 unobtrusively while reading The Times, have done them a horrible disservice. It's like that moment in the Karate Kid. No faces!  

Flatbread

I found a set of flatbread recipes I had added, diligently, to my folder into which I would throw, each week, anything that passed the tests of a) sufficiently tantalising and b) sufficiently doable (plus c) does not use a million ingredients - yes, I mean you Mr Ottolenghi). These were courtesy of Dan Leppard, the bread guru, one of whose books I have and whose bread recipes usually scare the bejeezus out of me. Fermenting times...add pickle juice...knead every 10 minutes for three hours...ok I exaggerate, but it is easy to be intimidated by bread recipes. So I cut out the flatbread pages, put them in my folder, and then ignored them every time I took the folder out. Until last week. One of those, don't-be-an-idiot-of-course-you-can-make-these things moment. In the blurb Dan tells me that once you have mastered them, suppertime will never be the same again. Hmm, I think. See, I am an enthusiastic cook/baker, I think we established that a long time ago.  But I also have a very busy, high octane job, and weekday nights are emphatically not for baking. Weekdays, if it's pizza it's takeout - though I will make a fabulous low GI high roughage salad to go with it.  I look carefully at the cornmeal flatbread recipe. It really doesn't seem too bad. I throw in the polenta, yeast, water, flour, salt, oil...at least, I don't throw them in, I actually treat every step of the process with great respect, because frankly guys if you are going to make bread, the number one rule is, don't mess with the instructions. Seriously. If it says use lukewarm water, then use lukewarm. Not cold, and not boiling hot. Yes, it will interfere with the yeast, giving you flat bread no matter what type you are trying to make. Etc. So I follow the steps, and literally 35 mins later I have a really cool, stretchy dough to make ball shapes out of, which I stretch out, create ridges round the side, and hey presto. Huge suppertime revelation. That, as I say, was a week ago, and since then we've had mozzarella and tomato flatbreads, feta, mushroom and mustard flatbreads with rocket scattered on top. Pumpkin and spice flatbread. Even chocolate flatbread with M&M's, for which I will not apologise. As Dan said, once you've mastered the flatbread, suppertime will never be the same.

Meanwhile, I'm about to experience Groundhog Day. In December I will be having my fifth orthopaedic operation. Surely I deserve a Loyalty Card at my local hospital (entitling you to a free blood transfusion with extra points!!) How much am I looking forward to the rebuilding of my right foot? there are no words for the plummeting awful anticipation of weeks back on crutches. But then, we are back where my blog started. Baking on one leg. Expect lots of experimental recipes in the weeks to come.

Malteser Tiffin

I was away for most of last week. Brilliant week in Berlin, obsessing over the Second World War and the Cold War.  It's always great to have a week off cooking. A whole 5 days of trying out variations on Berlin specialities (and resorting to ice cream). On the other hand, when I come back home the first thing I do is haul the flour out and get busy by the stove. I don't even check the mail. Or unpack.  So, we haul back into the house, I head for the kitchen, ready to make a chocolate Malteser cake (why? I don't know. I saw a picture of it in the in flight magazine and it struck a chord, maybe), and discover that we are Out of Flour. I have, like, 17 different kinds of flour in my cupboard, but have taken my eye off the ball and run out of plain flour. I contemplate making my cake with rye flour. or strong wholemeal. Organic self raising? My shoulders droop. I write it large and clearly on the shopping list, but meanwhile my Grand Plan has been scuppered. And now I have Maltesers on the brain. So I google Maltesers and come across an intriguing and super easy recipe for Malteser tiffin. This is a winner. As a lifelong hater of anything resembling a raisin, tiffin has not been high on my Baking Bucket List. But raisin-free tiffin packed with broken up Maltesers? Yum. I haul out a mega bag of Maltesers (no plain flour, but there are always Maltesers in the cupboard), spend much longer than I need to breaking them up into equally shaped shards (I know. I Need Therapy), and chuck them into my melted chocolate/syrup/butter concoction together with some smashed digestives. Into the fridge it goes, past my dribbling progeny. It's barely solidified before The Family goes in with knives. Is this, one of them enquires between bites, the dictionary definition of making lemonade out of lemons? No, I say. It's about using up the Maltesers before one of you nicks them. Tiffin. Raisin free. Baking impulse temporarily satiated, it's time to unpack.

Semolina and sick

I went to a primary school where semolina was the weekly pudding fare. Sloshed into chipped white bowls and handed out, every bit as if it were a 19th century back street poorhouse I was in and not a suburban private prep school - greyish, sick looking, lumpy and wholly repellent. Eating all courses was compulsory in my prep school - if you skipped anything, or you left anything on your plate, you got a ticking off, usually in a form that combined isolation and humiliation. Eating all that crap is probably the reason why I developed into a close-to-obese teenager, and fear of isolation has carried me through all my life. Hats off to the prep school then - one which in fact closed down, suddenly and without much warning.  Maybe the semolina, puked up into the bins, permeated the foundations and made the school buildings unsafe. I'd love to think so. Anyway. I'm a hugely keen baker, but there are some ingredients I will avoid like the plague, and semolina is one. It conjures up the stifling smell of the communal dining hall with long, low wooden benches, grey upon grey, and weekly semolina. But it's quite hip isn't it, these days, semolina? A trend I regard with as much horrified bemusement as the relentless championing of flares and platforms. Seriously guys, we gave them up at the end of the 70s for a reason. Actually it was when I saw rah rah skirts attempting a comeback that I really gave up on the fashion industry - but I digress. My point is, just because posh chefs start using something, doesn't mean we all have to. Except that I have started obsessing about Middle Eastern food, and whaddyaknow - they make those fab looking cheesy pastry thingies with semolina. Of course, the semolina they are talking about, is the coarsely milled durum wheat that looks yellow and a bit like couscous. It really makes me wonder what on EARTH the catering lot in Chingford were thinking when they boiled their semolina to buggery, squeezing out every ounce of flavour and goodness, chucking - well, who knows what - on top of it - Angel Delight powder? Jelly cubes? It's a mystery - to turn it into Something Cheap That Kids Will Eat. OK I'm not saying I would have been more enthusiastic about a bowl of pudding that came out yellow rather than grey. But perhaps at least I would have been making a bit more of an informed choice? I haven't yet made my cheese pastries. I still can't quite believe the box I have bought that says Semolina on it, is in fact the yellow durum wheat kind. I'm a bit worried I'll open it and find sludge. But hopefully, I will get over it - not least because I LOVE cheese and sesame pastry pockets, and will go a long way for a good one. Even as far as, right back into my childhood.

Low GI dessert

I was given a low GI cookery book recently, by a mate who wanted to know if I thought there was anything in the idea of eating low GI food - or whether a low GI alternative was just too depressing to bother with. I flicked through it a bit listlessly. I am someone whose body is inclined towards fat rather than towards thin, which means that for my entire life I have, along with Victoria Wood, been somewhere on the spectrum of fat/very fat/a bit fat/less fat. I tackle it with that good old fashioned diet known as All Things In Moderation plus Run Around A Bit More. Really not rocket science. I have loathed, consistently, every fad diet, and have tried precisely none of them. My issue with food, actually, is that I have a sugar addiction. I mean this without humour. I have struggled with this for as long as I can remember, and frankly I am pretty confident it is an addiction I share with millions of people, most of whom don't want to admit they are addicts. When I "diet", what that means for me, is going through weeks and weeks of feeling a horrible withdrawal after walking away from my favourite bar of chocolate. Even during a successful, long phase of healthier choices, I know I am never more than one birthday party away from a terminal lapse back into sugar overload.

Does it seem as if I am my own worst enemy then, with all this tempting stuff I bake? I'm often asked by my friends why I'm not the size of a house, with all the homemade cake. But, sugar addict though I am, the temptation is yet superseded by something very different when I bake. I never, ever, bake something because I want to eat it. I bake it because I want to make it. Because the process of creating it is at the same time relaxing and inspiring.  Most of my baking produce is stuff I take one slice of and that's it. I just want to know how it tastes when it comes out. The sieving of flour, melting of chocolate, or whisking of egg white are as energising to me as participating in a football match might be to someone else. So, as I flick through the Low GI cookbook, my main thought is, well why? I mean, I get the tune and cannellini bean stuff, but if you make a tart for the sheer enjoyment of it, then I am really unconvinced that you would get the same culinary high making a honey cream tart with digestives and butter instead of flour, and cream cheese and honey instead of milk, cream and sugar. I give it a go anyway - I make the tart, and it's yummy, just a bit boring to make, it takes me all of 15 minutes, I throw the strawberries on top, I dust it with icing sugar as directed, and serve it without a ganache in sight, and yes, it's eaten, though perhaps with marginally less enthusiasm. I turn then to the coffee and chocolate truffles, and oh joyohjoy, it entails melting chocolate, so I choose my very best dark stuff, and watch it melt to molten black gold colour, and then I add espresso coffee which turns it into a viscous pool, and then, mesmerisingly, I swirl honey into it, and I watch it, and stare at it, and...oh bollocks, I've spent so long staring at it that it's solidified. Well, if the purpose of low GI food is to eat less diabetes inducing calories, this last recipe has totally done the job. It's a thing of such beauty to create, that I spoil two more batches before I make something edible out of it. Excellent. Recipes for food you keep spoiling. Someone should give that a name and market it. I feel sure it would catch on in the modelling industry.

Tiramisu

How, seriously how, could I not have made tiramisu until now? A baking freak like me? I mean, I was the one hurling derision at the Great British Bake Off this week because none of the contestants knew what a breton cake was. I do! I've made one! Saw it in the pages of a Sunday supplement and had to try it out. See? That's how curious I am about baking. I've probably tried most of the weirder, harder, or just plain foreign forms of dough making - so it is a bit weird that along my culinary path,  I missed tiramisu. But recently I was given a copy of Claudia Rosen's Taste of Italy - or is it Food of Italy? - it was so exciting to be given it that I was deep into the pages before checking what the thing was called. Italy something. Anyway. It is chock full of beautiful descriptions of regional Italian cooking, and there, about two thirds through, just before you get to Veneto, is a recipe for a classic Tiramisu. Yum. My family loves the stuff. I sorted myself out with mascarpone, forgot to get brandy but hey, you just double the rum, nobody will notice; bought my lady's fingers from a pukka Italian shop near Barnet, the kind where the man behind the counter actually does have a bona fide Italian accent, and even the people sipping their espressos have Italian accents so it all feels like the ridiculous amount you are paying for your lady's fingers over and above what you would pay if you bought them at your local Tesco is well worth the experience of fantasising that you actually bought them in a village near Orvieto. And then I put it all away and waited to have the Mother of all weeks before making it. Why? Because, well, I don't bake for the eating. Obviously my family thinks I do. A promotional leaflet came through the door earlier this week from Waitrose and the headline was Good Things Come To Those Who Bake. Essentially it was full of pretty useless vouchers, except maybe for the free bag of soft light brown sugar, which I still haven't redeemed. Anyway. One of my kids picked it up, added a couple of words to it, and left it by an empty ramekin that had contained some pretty sumptuous chocolate custards I had made last weekend. I picked it up. It now read "Good Things Come to Those WHO LIVE WITH those Who Bake". Sweet. I think that's his way of saying, dam' fine custard Ma. Anyway, the family gobbles up all baking produce and are sufficiently grateful to have me around to provide it, and I get a lot of gratification from their pleasure in eating the stuff. But it's not primarily why I bake it. I bake it, for the pleasure of baking. My best baking time is after a really long and difficult day at work, something hardly anyone else I know understands. Even enthusiastic baker friends of mine, don't tend to bake after work, but at the weekends. I bake at the weekends too, but if I have had a hard day, my antidote is to sink my hands into a bowl of flour. Or stare at melting chocolate. Or roll truffles in rich cocoa powder. This week: a hell of a week darting from issue to issue, meeting to meeting - I ran so often from one meeting room to the next that my shoes needed reheeling by Friday. I kid you not. But at the back of my head, as I bored the pants off myself in corporate reviews, or focused like mad on every detail of a politically charged debate, was, at the first whiff of free time, I am whipping up egg white and sinking sponge finger biscuits into coffee and rum. I mean, I go to the gym regularly - I swim fast and furious lengths, run quantities on the eco friendly running machine, pull weights and box, but none of them induces the same spirit lifting sensation as the anticipation of making something beautiful to eat. And so, today my tiramisu was made. Sponge fingers. Mascarpone with egg white, icing sugar, egg yolk. Topped with chocolate shards, grated and chopped to the sound of female upbeat folk from Radio 6. And now it sits in the fridge, where apparently it needs, like, another 10 hours before it can be eaten. If we were purists. But we're not. We're a family that loves tiramisu. I guarantee it will be gone by bedtime. Yay. Time to bake again.

Cornbread

I got a letter a few days ago with a date for my next piece of reconstructive surgery. After the success of rebuilding my left foot, my surgeon is enthused by the idea of repeating the exercise on my right. Surgery is a bit like giving birth - absolutely bloody awful at the time, with weeks and weeks of awful after that (particularly if you gave birth by c-section - any of those Too Posh To Push critics need to think seriously about what life is like for an average woman with daily chores, heaving herself around with a new baby and 15 stitches across her abdomen. You have no idea what it is like to cough while that massive great big slit is healing, nor how impossible lifting up even a paper bag can be, let alone a new baby).  Anyway. As with newborns as time goes by the memories of what was frankly tortuous about the initial experience recedes as the benefits multiply. In the case of foot injuries and major reconstructive surgery, it is frankly incredible how I have managed to obliterate from memory the months and months of painful physiotherapy. I can barely even remember the first weeks when I could not even raise my foot from the knee. Since that time I have done two charity runs, I walk an average of 10 miles a day, I run around like any chore-laden woman, I run for trains and buses, I run for meetings I am late to; I scamper up and down stairs, I shoot off on my bike, and barely 2 and a half years ago I could do almost none of these things. The impact on my life has been so huge, that it is perhaps unsurprising I should have minimised the experience of pain, the immobilising effect of a foot in plaster up to my knee. But my letter has come through, and I sit and look at it while sipping tea, and decide that perhaps it isn't buried so deeply after all. In short, I can't face it. I am not quite ready to go back there. I don't yet have sufficient emotional energy to get back into the zone of bum shuffling down the stairs, fluff gathering on a pair of outsized black sweatpants, the only things I can get on over my plaster; of carrying my essentials (mobile phone, tissues, lip salve) in a bum bag so that I don't have to drag myself everywhere to find them when I need them. Of only going to my bedroom at night, and only leaving it in the morning, because otherwise moving between them is 20 stairs too far for me. Of staggering on my crutches and barely making it two houses beyond my own. I am not ready for it. I am still celebrating what I can do. I can't quite give it back up yet, even for what will only be 4 or 5 months. Anyone who has ever had a limb in plaster will tell you that 4 months off the road is a lifetime to your injured body and stressed out soul. On top of which, the surgery is scheduled around the 2nd anniversary of the death of my sister. I have already written much about this, but one thing I have not mentioned, is the horror of hospitals that that whole gut wrenching tragedy left me with. I can barely walk into one without shuddering. Spend a week in one, during the same period in which I sat next to my sister and watched her slip away from me, finally, irrevocably? And replay helplessly in my head the numb appallingness of my visit to the bereavement office; the running around from floor to floor to secure a confirmation of death; a check to find out the opening time of the hospital mortuary; the horrible visit to the registry office with the paperwork and my parents, bowed over with shock, to have a death certificate issued; and then back to the hospital to hand in the certificate to secure the release of my sister's body? No. I can't go back in there yet. The NHS being what it is, none of this is a factor. All they record is, that I have refused surgery when offered, and if I do it again, I'll lose my referral and slide right back down to the bottom of the Snakes and Ladders board. Well that's my bad. I'll have the surgery in December and use the Christmas break to recover. In the meantime, I've whipped up cinnamon sugar cornbread. I make cornbread with vegetable stews usually, and it disappears in seconds, used to mop up the leftover juices. This one, with a thick topping of cinnamon sugar, should in theory be sliced up with butter slathered on it warm, and possibly jam. But it smells so fantastic and what better household smell is there in the world than warm cinnamon (as well the huge supermarkets know, which is why it smacks your face when you walk into one, right by the bread section), that it is snarfed down seconds after coming out of the oven.  It's comforting stuff. I must remember to bake it again, when I am back from hospital, my right leg incarcerated this time, going back to the starting point of this blog: kneeling on a chair, crutches perched by the stove, mixing flour, butter and sugar, healing my soul, while my foot heals itself.

The Flat Foot Curse

I upgraded my wardrobe this Summer. What does this mean? After reading newspaper article after magazine comment piece setting out how women are torpedoing their chances of career progression by wearing the wrong clothes, dismissing them loftily in my head as having nothing to do with my stampingly brilliant performance at work which I felt sure was all you needed to kill it in The Job Interview, I finally caved and jettisoned my ethnic skirts, my drop waist, mad-print mini dresses and my bobbly oversized t shirts, and invested during the Summer sales in rather more adult shift dresses, nicely fitted jacket, and shirts that had buttons that you had to do up rather than pull over your head. It was a lot less painful an experience than you might think. For starters, my new dresses are fire engine red, aching pink, multidimensional purple; the new black Jaeger jacket is a stretch jersey fabric that has already done time in the overhead lockers of budget aeroplanes and still happily kept its shape and its sense of humour; the pencil skirt that actually fits and sits, modestly and yet suggestively, a few millimetres above the knee, is directional, professional looking and yet, well, kind of schoolmarmishly sexy - and in any case I have teamed it so far with a bright blue blazer, a hot pink jacket, and a red coat with yellow piping. Yup. You can take the girl out of the show but you can't take the showgirl out of the woman.  On top of which, I have been stopped no less than three times in the street or on the tube by enthused fellow commuters wanting to know where I got The Dress so here, if you are one of those people who is on the lookout for workers who look like you want to look - it is irrelevant where I got The Dress (Hobbs, Jaeger, occasionally Whistles, maybe Oasis, and very, very rarely, M&S) - what makes people stop and ask me is that before it goes on my body, it pays a visit to The Tailor, a set of brilliant women variously from Poland, Hungary and Iran who work at a dressmaker's near me, who alter all my work clothes so they fit me rather than the hanger they were designed for. Trust me on this. A few critical tucks will transform your outfit. Just look at Kate Middleton (if you must). Think she REALLY just throws on that cheap Oasis flare skirt before her ladies in waiting have attacked it with a pair of scissors and some needle and thread?? Anyway. Clothes were not the problem in transforming and upgrading my Corporate Look. Shoes were.  I have horribly flat feet. The non existent arches cause them to pronate  so shockingly that ever podiatrist I have ever visited has, after recoiling in horror, rubbed their hands together in commercial glee, foreseeing years of high spec orthotics costing me millions, or at the very least, a new medical experiment that would earn them a fellowship at the Royal Society. My feet will not fit into any commercial shoe. I am certain I am not alone in this, and unfortunately, shoes are not things you can take to be altered.  I loathe stilettoes anyway and court shoes are boringly pompous things, but having splashed out on such transforming outfits I can hardly mess them up with my favourite walking boots. So. Covertly, I have procured myself, after extensive online research, shoes from designers that routinely feature in Good Housekeeping.  On receipt I have taken them to the nearest bead shop and flounced them up with my own sticky-on designs. Where did you get those shoes? - enquires a fellow commuter on the Northern line. What do I tell her?  Umm, I sort of made them myself, I mumble. She passes me her card. I have flat feet, she whispers conspiratorially, almost shamefacedly, and I would LOVE shoes like yours. Can you make me some? Oh Lord. Now I've done it.

Chocolate custard on a rainy day

I am frankly tired, as a Brit, of opening papers the weekend before a public holiday and reading the gleeful predictions of yet another Bank Holiday washout. Obviously newspaper editors, who are themselves British, know full well that a rainy Bank Holiday is about as inevitable in the UK as tube strikes, but somehow, it still manages to make the news. And not just any news. Front Page News. It is a bit like me putting a post it on the outside of my front door that says "WOMAN LIVES INSIDE THIS HOUSE".  All weekend, all media is full of the impending awfulness of the Wet Day Off. Wimps. Were those of us stuck back in London rather than cavorting on our yachts on the Riviera, or doing the Ice Bucket challenge on a beach in St Tropez where ice cubes down the back would be welcome, sexy even, actually in need of a confirmation of the social assumption that not being away on a public holiday condemns you to the grimmest of wet days, media is on hand to remind us of it. I see wet public holidays in a different way. Firstly, I grow vegetables. Anyone willing to water them in my place gets a firm thumbs up. A day of rain is particularly fab as for reasons I have not yet googled, rain perks up my garden like no amount of hose water. Secondly, it means I am somewhat exempt from my FitBit induced walking target. Yes, I know. Umbrellas/galoshes/raincoat. Yeah, but only the really obsessed would take to urban streets to hit their 20,000 a day target in this kind of weather, and the more I wear my Fitbit, the more rebellious it is making me. Why SHOULD I walk home via a 5 mile detour? I realise the obvious contradiction - all I have to do if I really don't want to play any more, is take the damn bracelet off - it's not like I'm a Marvel anti hero who has had this terminally injected into my brain or stabbed into my thigh while I was sleeping, for goodness sake. Yet the very inexorableness of FitBit puts me into a bit of a bad mood. It's very proposition is its problem. If only there were a mechanism in there, like a Go Easy On Yourself day, that I didn't have to programme in myself. Anyway. I take one sloppy walk up the towpath, head back home with mud splatters up to my buttocks, and decide I'm Done. The only thing to do on a rainy day, is bake. But bake what? Rainy weather calls for comfort food, the baking equivalent of a jacket potato with baked beans, or a minestrone when you're feeling really sorry for yourself. I debate the challenge for some time. I weigh up the pros and cons of a cake versus the chewiest of biscuits. I discard a chocolate sour cream sponge recipe, debate a strawberry mousse, and finally opt for chocolate custards. Nothing beats this for comfort food. No creme brulee - comfort food means your teeth needs to encounter only the soft and fluffy. And no fruit either - sticking raspberries into a confection of dark chocolate, eggs, cream and sugar is a sophisticated take on this dessert, but I do not want sophistication. And I decide against dark chocolate too. It's milk chocolate this time - albeit the really good stuff - which I melt with cream, whisk into an egg and vanilla/sugar mix, and pour into 6 ramekins, then place into a bain marie on a gentle light. I bring them out, glistening, half an hour later, and by 11am half of them have disappeared. One of my kids has a friend over, which accounts for this. But I have also taken one and eaten it draped over my favourite armchair, book on my lap, retro music on the radio, rain drumming on the extension roof. I don't guzzle this down - it is spoonful after languid spoonful, while turning the pages of a really good read - and then scraping down the sides. Aaaah. Do I need the excuse of another rainy day to make these babies again?

Chocolate Pizza

Every so often I get inspired to produce something other than a cake for somebody's birthday. Years back when my eldest kid was small, I copied Nigella and made a stack of gooey brownies, cascaded icing sugar all over them, and then stuck a candle in every one, stacking them pyramid-like. My son needed the help of all his mates to blow them out, and he loved it, loved that he could pick the brownie with his favourite colour candle on it (blue), loved that nobody had to wait for me to slice it up but could just grab their first, second or third brownie on the go. It was a huge success. I didn't repeat the idea until earlier this year, when my younger sister came over to my house so I could take her for a makeover for her birthday, and while the heavily made up Mac consultant attacked her with a mascara wand, I headed up to the top floor of the shop with her eldest daughter, where I bought a box of 12 Krispy Kremes, and when we got back to my house, I stuck a candle in each one...well, you know how the story ends.  Recently, my eldest son got some fairly significant exam results, and I mulled over how to congratulate with him via my baking. Have you ever seen those chocolate pizzas that you can buy in shops or online? They cost a princely fifteen quid and they are a round slab of what is alleged to be Belgian chocolate, cut into pizza squares, and decorated with M&Ms and chocolate sprinkles, marshmallows and red glitter and white chocolate curls. They look sickening, but really what's not to love for the ultimate chocolate fix. And they gave me the idea of making a chocolate pizza. A while back I experimented with chocolate pasta - I bought the pasta ready chocolatified from Hotel Chocolat, made a butterscotch sauce for it, served it up, we all took a mouthful each and had to go and lie down, it was so ridiculously rich. It was a fun experiment, but it did not enter the Melinda Simmons hall of dessert fame. But the itch to continue the theme was strong, and I figured I could probably work out for myself how I might make a chocolate pizza. So, using my usual dough recipe, I added 20g of cocoa powder. Sieved it all in, added my liquid of yeast, sugar, oil and water, formed my brownish dough and left it to rise. An hour or two later, I took a quarter of it, rolled it out, and spread melted Galaxy chocolate over it as its sauce. Put it in the oven. For a minute too long as it turned out - the sauce had been absorbed into the base. But no matter - I smeared another layer of Galaxy over it, and then had what you might call a loss of perspective. I grated chocolate curls over it. I scattered Galaxy buttons over it. I chopped up flake bars and scattered them around the outside. I let it all sit, so the base of the extra chocolate would melt enough for it to stick to the base. And then I cut it into slices and I served it. And it was gone in minutes, bar one slice, which I kept to show my neighbours. Fast forward to the weekend and I find myself planning another two chocolate pizzas - for kids' birthday parties. Hooray. I've hit on the ultimate birthday cake alternative. If only people would keep their hands off my chocolate pizza for long enough for me to take a picture of the damn thing and post it on Instagram/Pinterest/Twitter, I might actually have the beginnings of a viral trend. Sigh.

Chocolate chip rebellion

I've had a lot of apples to bake with recently. I planted espalier trees in my garden two years ago - two pear trees, and two apple - and after a desultory first year, they decided they weren't going to commit mass suicide after all, and with much coaxing and the help of the mild weather that Gardener's World has been going nuts about for weeks now (hard to imagine, that - gardeners going nuts - you equate GW with a sort of post-lobotomy calm rather than impassioned glee, which is precisely why you should tune in sometime - you're in for a shocker), while my pear trees have erred on the circumspect side, still a bit suspicious of their surroundings, and have yielded only one pear each, my apple trees have happily had a proverbial field day. I have pondered what to do with them and my last post was partly about the rebel in me rejecting apple pies and apple compote that form the bulk of apple - related baking. And I have to tell you that those apple, peanut butter and cinnamon cookies that I baked with the first batch were the best cookies ever. But they only use one apple to make, so an unsatisfactory solution to the conundrum of what to do with my bushels of fruit before they rot on me. Mary Berry's apple loaf cake seemed like a good way forward - three apples needed for the recipe, which makes two loaves, in theory. I got going - bowls and measuring cups out, apron on, hair tied back, cinnamon and flour at the ready - and then paused over a reference to apricot jam. It's very Mary Berry isn't it, apricot jam. Very British and villagey and WI and it evokes National Trust tea rooms and floral socks. I loathe apricot jam, however,  but I am halfway through my cake prep so I have to think fast about what I replace it with. I turn out my baking cupboards and decide that dark chocolate would go really well with the tart sweetness of the apple. So I tip a load in. I chuck the loaf mix in the oven (going for one huge cake rather than two sweet, perfectly proportioned ones - just one of many reasons why I wouldn't last five minutes on the Great British Bake Off) and when it comes out, smelling apply and chocolatey, I look at its demarara encrusted top, and decide further experimentation is needed. Mary had wanted sliced apple and further jam glaze to crown these loaves. I pull out white chocolate chips, and and toss them liberally all over the top. Thickly. I have in fact created a double chocolate apple demarara cake, which, judging from its popularity, has knocked the floral socks off apricot jam. My point? Chocolate chips are for so much more than decorating birthday cupcakes with. They are for cavalier, rebellious, mid-bake experimentation. Tear open the packet. And chuck in.

Apple peanut butter cookies

It's funny isn't it. You put months and months of effort into getting your tree to grow some fruit. Feed it, prune it, kill off the greenfly, whitefly, blackfly, colonising ants.  Then finally, years after planting the espalier tree,  an apple grows. Then another. Suddenly you have seventeen of them and you're faced with weeks and weeks of stewed apple, baked apple and apple compote. Or apple pie and cream. No. I wasn't going to break my back growing apples on my mini tree only to eat baby food.  So I pored and researched and mugged up and turned from recipe book to recipe book. And turned out a bramley, cinnamon and demarara cake so fragrant it made my neighbour weep. And not my next door neighour either. The one who lives four doors down and over the road. A great result, but one that only dispatched two of my seventeen apples.  So. Back to the recipe books for something that would need a whole bushel for the dough. And I discovered apple peanut butter cookies.  Granted, I spent most of the morning grating my fruit and frantically whipping it in the owl to stop it from going brown on me. And, if I'm honest, I was slightly revolted at the concept of peanut butter and apple in a cookie. But if you are an obsessive baker, then half of the fun is about experimenting with flavours, no matter how counterintuitive.  My chicken biscuits were a definite failure. Straight from oven to bin. Hey, I was trying to be a pioneer. And if you are prepared to make chicken biscuits, then combining apple and peanut butter in an oat based cookie is, pardon the pun, a piece of cake. So. Apple, peanut butter,flour, sugar, egg, butter, spoonfuls of batter dropped on to a baking tray, 15 crucial minutes in the oven, and they are ready.  And this time the entire street is outside my house, drawn by the amazing aroma of baking sweet Bramley. Which is just as well, as the batter has yielded around 50 of the things. I down around 10 of them. They are unputdownable. And my neighbours think so too, which is just as well as if I'd eaten any more I'd have thrown up, they were so rich. So. Another successful baking experiment. My house smells amazing. And I am out of apples. Win win.

Loss

I read a very moving article detailing an interview that Bob Geldof gave, in which he talked about how he was affected by the loss of his daughter, Peaches. He talked about walking down the street, suddenly getting a "sense of her" and being physically winded by the sensation - of needing to duck down a side street so he could cry without being snapped by paps. I know how he feels. Not, thank goodness, about paps. My anonymity pretty much means I can blub wherever I like, the worst that would happen would be quizzical and likely fearful side glances from fellow Northern line commuters. No, I know what he means about being overtaken suddenly and uncontrollably, by that helpless feeling of loss. This week I have been at home, recovering from a chest infection. I have been anxious about it, because this weekend I am down to run the Race For Life, my annual tribute to my sister Lauren, who I lost 18 months ago. Lauren's grave is too far away for me to visit regularly, and when I do visit, I have honestly to say that it is a pain to get there - up the unforgiving M25, queue for ages on an A road running alongside Epping Forest, weaving through the mourners - it is a busy cemetery, with funerals and stonesettings every half hour. Getting out of the cemetery is even more of a nightmare than getting in, traffic making it a feat of cunning to be able to make a right turn towards Essex, which I always need to do - having made the journey that far, I would habitually visit my family, who live out that way, before returning home.  But look. When Lauren was really sick and in a hospital even further away, I had no problem jumping in the car and driving the 90 minutes (on a good day) there and 90 minutes back - sometimes twice a day - to see her. My issue with her grave is, that though I visit it out of respect, I don't feel that that is where she is. She is inside me. Whenever I think of her, and I do, at least a few times a day - the response I get is from inside me. And sometimes that response is very, very painful. Until yesterday I was resigned to giving the Race For Life a miss this year. Nobody should trifle with a chest infection, and though I was feeling a lot better, the weather forecast was dodgy etc etc. But yesterday I was taking a walk, and over on the other side of the road I saw a woman who resembled my sister, so closely I called her name out. This woman was of the same height and build, had the same dark, soft, curly hair. She was even wearing similar colours to the clothes my sister used to favour. As I caught her up on the other side of the road, it became clearer that this was not Lauren - indeed, you might think I would have known this immediately, for obvious reasons - but, and Bob G would understand this, it made perfect sense to me that Lauren might actually be alive, and all that had happened was that she had gone on an incredibly long holiday for the last 18 months. Even as I realised this woman was not my sister, I stared at her profile, willing her to be Lauren. Then being really angry that she wasn't Lauren. And then crying my eyes out, sprawled on a bench at the nearest bus shelter, overwhelmed by the disappointment, and the reminder of my loss. I recovered, finished my walk, came back home, and by the time the kettle had boiled, I had made up my mind. I was doing the Race For Life. It fulfils a lot of functions, this event. One of them, something that Cancer Research UK knows full well may even be the main motive for its participants, is catharsis. I need to do this to be in the company of people who understand this loss. I need it to restore my perspective and get back to the business of, as Bob G put it in his interview, "getting on with it".  So. I have her name pinned on my back, I've tanked up on antibiotic, and I am Ready To Go.

Fitbit Hell

Recently I started using a FitBit. I finally gave in to this latest app/gadget, because I finally faced up to the awful truth - that exercising once, vigorously, first thing in the morning, does not entitle you to the life of a slob for the other 23 hours of the day. I am doing a 5k run next week, the Race For Life - I have been doing this run ever since my sister was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and now that she has died, I run it as a way of putting the ongoing, nagging pain of that loss into some sort of perspective. And I know 5k is not a lot for a runner, but then I am not a runner. I am an orthopaedic patient. I have had four rounds of orthopaedic surgery and in fact in Autumn I will be having my fifth, so frankly any kind of distance that I achieve at a pace faster than a cautious two step, is a miraculous victory of bloody minded determination over generic NHS prognoses, and I do tend to get smug satisfaction out of demonstrating my Underdog Status. So. A 5k run coming up, and my training, though helping to increase my pace a bit, was not doing a whole lot for my overall look. Basically, I was still wobbling in places that really shouldn't be wobbling. I figured the answer was, to find gentle ways to be more active throughout the day, rather than just doing one blast of exercise in the morning. Walking had to be the most obvious way of doing this. I easily walk 10000 steps a day just a result of my commute and the frequent back and forth to meetings in different building along the very long road I work at. But getting some consistency in that, plus challenging myself to a higher target, might, I thought, produce a difference. Well, it has. Grudging hats off to the walking advocates. I am almost into my third week and frankly I am a bit stunned to see how much more lithe I feel, how much more easily I zip into my skirts, and how much more easily I am sleeping (huge and unexpected bonus, that last one). But my friends, if you are inspired by this post to buy a FitBit, a word of caution. I had been using my IPod as a pedometer and the problem was, that it ran out of charge too quickly to be effective. The FitBit will last you a good 5 days or more before you have to charge it. Hooray. But by setting yourself up on the App, you join a vast community of people who all appear to have obsessive compulsive disorder. These are people who are logging the quality of their sleep, every millilitre of water drunk, every calorie ingested. People who pore agonizingly over the definitions of their frame and the characterisation of their lifestyle - critical for FitBit's basic stats that then determine what weight loss they calculate your various bits of progress add up to. The chat fora resemble nothing so much as a geeky Good Samaritan conversation. I am mildly horrified to find myself in this world and I try pretty hard not to get sucked into it. For example, the first night I experimented with monitoring my sleep quality, I couldn't sleep. I kept waking up thinking, was that REM or not??? So I stick to aiming for 15000 steps a day. But even then, FitBit tells you which are active steps and which aren't. And you get really, really hooked. I find myself looking at the flashing lights on my wristband and deciding to get off 3, no 4, no 6 stops earlier on the tube so I can add one more flashing light to the mix. It will also add 45 minutes to my commute, but hey, it's got to be worth it for one more flashing light!! Net result: I Am Exhausted. How this is possible for a girl who boxes, swims, pulls weights and is training for a run, I am still struggling to get my head round. Who knew walking so much could be so draining. And these days I am struggling to finish reading my paper on the tube because I keep pulling out my phone to check my fitness status on the FitBit app, which, excitingly, you do not need an internet connection to synch. Yay. So, I am in the Bermuda Triangle. I have been captured by the FitBit police and transported to a world where you obsess over every journey you take, even one to the bins, and value it on the basis of a daily target. But hey. I am back into my turquoise shorts, the ones I shoved to the back of the wardrobe in shame over three years ago because I couldn't zip them up any more. That is a win win.

Peanut Butter Squares

I've been working at the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict summit all this week. My team and I have worked for months and months for this week, and turns out, it was worth all the effort. Hilary Clinton called this a "summit to end all summits".  Right, so no pressure then, for the organisers. But she was right - this was not a darkened room with Ministers round a table. This was noisy, colourful, swarming with people, installations, theatre, powerful pictures, painful testimony, mock trials of UN resolution 1325 (look it up)...somewhere in the middle of it, or to be more accurate, in discussion room 4, which was right at the back in a corner, I was chairing discussions on child soldiers, on women building peace, on..well I kind of lost track somewhere around the middle of day 2.  Friday afternoon it was over and the organising teams lay around, panting with exhaustion, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed with the sheer relief of having averted logistical disaster....it had been a good week. I headed home to write up a speech I was delivering in my local community on Saturday morning. My brain was still functioning on nervous adrenaline and I couldn't quite give up the ghost. The next day, I delivered the speech, tissues were out in the audience all over the place, plaudits all round afterwards, and I was finally at liberty to collapse. But, I've never really been that good at collapsing. I came home and considered my options. An afternoon of mindless TV. A 5 hour bath. Straight to bed to sleep off the week, no getting up again before Monday? I headed into the kitchen. Before taking up any, or all, of these options, I needed a celebration bake. And when I do a celebration bake, I get heavily into children's party food. Mini key lime pies, mini cheesecakes, fairy cakes with hundreds and thousands scattered randomly over them...I opted for chocolate peanut butter squares. If you google a recipe, you get about a hundred. Considering the ingredients for a chocolate peanut butter square are self evident and indisputable - chocolate, sugar, peanut butter, digestive biscuits and butter - it seems pretty extraordinary that there could be any debate about how to make them. But there is, and I've tried nearly all of them, out of sheer curiosity (and also because I have a baking obsession - nobody reasonable would spend whole weekends comparing chocolate peanut butter square recipes). I opt for the BBC Good Food recipe today, which uses dark chocolate instead of milk, smooth peanut butter instead of crunchy, and golden castor sugar instead of muscovado. I chuck the base into the food processor, melt the chocolate, pour one over the other in a square tin, throw it into the fridge, and 2 hours later, chop it up and pass it over to my teenage family for immediate consumption. Only then am I ready for that 5 hour bath.  Look, when you've spent all week campaigning to end sexual violence in war zones, making chocolate peanut butter squares is a humble and simple way to ease yourself back into the privilege of your safe, daily life.

Muscovado sugar

I have multiple sugars in my cupboard. Demerara. Soft brown sugar. Castor sugar. Splenda diabetic sugar replacement (yuk). Granulated sugar, icing sugar, soft dark sugar, and the Gladiator of all sugars, muscovado. Light and dark, large packs of each. Muscovado packs a mean punch. I use it to make chocolate puddings, or it makes a fabulous crust on, well, pretty much anything - I have tried it round the outside of bread dough, I have coated stewed fruit in it, I used it to inject some personality into a generic chocolate mousse (no. It didn't work one bit. But it was fun trying). Today I used it to make a chocolate and banana loaf. The addition of muscovado has turned the sweetness into something treacly and wicked, and by wicked I do not mean calories. It is a Two-Fingers-Up-At-You sugar, and after my encounter at my local gym, this was the baking attitude I was after. I am a regular gym goer, even a bit obsessive - I go five times a week, of which I will swim once, take a boxing class once, do an abs class once, do an hour of cardio...you see what I mean. When it comes to gyms, I have been going for so long and so often, there isn't much equipment I haven't given a try. TRX. WTF? I know, but they work your glutes like no bosu ball ever will. Any idea what I'm talking about? No? Join a gym and you'll find out. It is a whole new world, and frankly, even the most inviting suburban affairs can be horribly intimidating. What is an overweight, blobby person meant to make of kettlebells, powerplates or electronic skipping ropes? But gym jargon is not the most intimidating factor. It's the people. There is this slightly inevitable culture in gyms, that you only go if you already look fabulous. This makes no logical sense of course but since when were gyms about logic?  I am in training at the moment for a charity run, something I need to take care over with my permanently damaged knee and newly mobile rebuilt foot, but I regard these as challenges to manage rather than obstacles to live with, something which elicits a weary sigh from my orthopaedic surgeon whenever I see him. But I am not stupid, and I don't run, I just jog, and I phase it, and today I decide to mix it up with an abs class that I spot is just about to start when I pitch up, fresh from a 15 minute stop/starter round the park. I walk in, join the group, and get going. It's a fast class, run by an unfeasibly young looking guy whose abs appear to be made of steel. Mine are too, it's just that they are protected by several layers of squishy cotton wool. My stamina at this class is good, I just sure as hell don't look the part. This becomes painfully obvious when the instructor asks us to pair off for the last set. There are 13 of us so we look at each other slightly warily. Immediately I clock that I appear to be the only woman there with a behind you can see, or indeed, boobs that move when I do. And everyone else there clocks it at the same time. The women on my left and right abruptly turn to their neighbour, and lo, Miss Fatty is left to do her set with the instructor. I get an excellent 1 to 1 set at which I work hard so it's a win win. But it makes me angry. It shouldn't, but find me someone who has been through the hell of teenage PE rejection, whose humiliating memories are not stirred up by this story. It doesn't make me want to tear up my membership or write angry letters to anyone. I am not rude to the women next to me who have chosen a stick insect clone to be their workout partner. I am just depressed that years later, the same snap judgements are alive and well at the one place where you should be able to build your confidence, not run a risk of having it flattened. I jog back home after the class, making a mental note to bring my Friends With Boobs to the next abs class I go to. And when I get home and I'm showered and ready to bake, well, you can see why I reached for the muscovado. Other people write complaint letters. I channel it into a damn fine banana bread.

Fondants and trauma

Sorry for the recent silence. I've been busy, but that isn't really why I haven't been blogging. The main reason is because a dear friend of mine has been diagnosed with not one but two horrific illnesses, both degenerative and both terminal. Honeslty, I thought that after watching my sister's body being invaded by a relentless cancer, and experiencing the desperate impotence of watching her fade away before my eyes, powerless to do anything to stop it despite my many hours, long into the night, spent feverishly looking up medical trials and alternative remedies, I didn't think I could be shocked by serious physical illness again. I didn't think I could even experience the trauma again, that we all go through when someone we care about is diagnosed. I thought I was numb to it. Turns out, surprise surprise, I'm not. And not in that maudlin, memory-reviving way, though goodness knows there is quite a bit of that in my everyday life. It is only very recently, well into the second year since I lost my sister, that I began to understand properly, that I wasn't going to get past the grief and the loss, that instead I was going to need to reconcile myself to it as a burden I would carry with me for the rest of my life. I would in time learn to find a place for it. I would go through beautiful periods of memory, I would collect pictures of my past that would remind me of my sister, I would revive these with others in my family. But the grief wasn't ever going to go away. It was a part of me. That is a tough realisation. But that is not what sparked the introspection brought on by my friend's terrible challenges. Even with my altered perspective, turns out my main emotional responses haven't been affected, and I was shocked by my friend's diagnosis - shocked, concerned, upset, and deeply committed to working out sensible ways to be helpful. If there is one positive thing I did learn from my sister's illness, it was that really - that there are ways to be helpful that will actually add value, even in the grimmest of times in someone's life, and there are attempts at help that can be, well, unhelpful at best, or at worst pretty insensitive. So I ponder and decide that since there is nothing I can do about my friend's condition, I will help by reminding her of friendship, and offering her a place to come where she can talk about other things than what is happening to her body. I dug up my garden and built an entirely new one shortly after I lost my sister, and it has become a beautiful place of refuge. I invited my friend to come and sit in it, and she accepted with alacrity, even gratefully. I wandered into the kitchen and had a think about how baking could be a  part of this refuge. I needed to make something very special, and comforting at the same time. I've been watching the Masterchef semis with some envy as contestant after contestant has turned out the perfect fondant. I have never made one before. Didn't rate my baking skills highly enough. But this felt like an occasion worth pushing the boat out for. So. I pulled out the ingredients and proceeded with a familiar sense of release that I always get when I pick up a spatula and a mixing bowl, to prepare the ingredients for a chocolate peanut butter fondant. Tricky this. The consistency of the filling has to be just right if is going to be gooey, and the timing of the bake has to be spot on if the outside is to be a bit crusty but not too much, and the inside is to retain its softness. And, I almost, not quite but nearly, pull it off. These fondants look beautiful. They glisten darkly with chocolate. I cut down the middle of one, and, well, it's not gooey. Nope. I haven't delivered. But it's nearly there. The middle, the peanut butter bit, salty and caramelly, is very, very soft, while it's shell is a degree less so. I serve up creme fraiche and vanilla ice cream as options on the side, and bring one out to her. She bites into it, sat on my bench, staring at pink and purple and blue of my lush garden. She smiles. This is amazing, she says. I smile back. And thank the stars, not for the first time, for my baking passion. It beats a box of chocolates or a bag of grapes any day.

Baking with Matza

What Jews do with matza during the Passover festival should be an inspiration to bakers everywhere, whether you are Jewish or not, and whether you use matza or not. One Hundred Things to Bake With Matza might be the title I choose for my autobiography one day. You would think that eight days (or seven for the reform minded) of abstinence from all things containing a raising agent (corn, pulses and peas included if you are a hardcore Ashkenazi) would make most people retreat to a world of omelettes and grilled fish with a variation on the simple salad for the entire week - and for years I was one of those people, celebrating the minute I put all my Passover kitchenware away, with a massive pizza and several beers, both Banned Substances during Passover. But no. For many, Passover presents a classic Masterchef-like baking challenge. How many ways can you create something edible from a sheet of matza? We will leave aside matza ball soup, matza brei (don't even ask) or, hilariously, matza lasagna (which my kids love). Let's stick with the sweet stuff. Passover cheesecake, with matza meal in the crust instead of digestive biscuits. It's delicious. Granted, you need a pneumatic drill to cut the base, but once achieved, it is a yummy, buttery, sweet mixture that holds its own perfectly under its vanilla cream topping. Chocolate walnut macaroons, with quantities of egg white to create and hold the biscuit shell. Every modern woman is acquainted with the classic flourless chocolate cake that in the 21st century has overtaken the traditional almond slab (plava) beloved of our parents and grandparents. But the Oscar for applied matza baking, goes, in my view, to the chocolate caramel matza bites. There are two reasons for bestowing the crown on this particular baking feat. The first is, because against all odds it is ridiculously yummy. It is the perfect replacement for things like millionare's shortbread, chocolate peanut butter squares or Rocky Road (actually, there is nothing wrong with making Rocky Road at Passover as long as you don't use Maltesers, etc etc...except that making different stuff at Passover is part of the point).  Here is how you do it. Line a tray with foil and then with baking paper. Cover it with sheets of matza, the bogstandard kind. Boil up soft brown sugar and butter. Off the heat, add vanilla and rock salt. Pour the concoction over your matza. Put in the oven to bake for 15 mins, check regularly to ensure it doesn't burn. Take it out. Shake loads of milk chocolate chips all over it. Leave for five minutes for the chips to melt. Then spread with a spatula, leave to harden, then break into bits and serve. It will be gone in seconds. Which leads me to the second reason for the crown, which is - why, oh why, would you do this to matza? The purpose of matza is to remind us of the Exodus story every time we put this cardboard stuff in our mouths. But turning it into a horribly moreish teatime fixation, transcends its purpose. It turns it into something pretty damn fabulous, a possible contender for the Great British Bake Off final, which, though it may toy somewhat with the ultimate purpose of Passover, does make the whole week of abstinence a lot less gloomy prospect. Matza baking. Come on. Roll up your sleeves and grab that brown sugar. You know you want to.

Cracks in the Pavement

To get from my house to the subway is a 15 minute walk - 12 minutes if you speedwalk as I do pretty much every day that I am commuting to work - and, on the way there, it is all uphill. Not steep, mind you - the street from our house to the main road is most obviously a climb and even that is fairly gentle, not all that pleasant at 0600 after a bad night's sleep or a wild night out partying, but manageable if you're on form - and then it's a steady upward trajectory to the station. The walk home, therefore, has pleasing psychology - downhill all the way to your place of rest. This is how the able bodied experience it. But when I started this blog, my left leg was encased in plaster, I wasn't allowed to put weight on it at all for three months, and I thought my biggest challenge would be working up the strength to haul myself to the end of the street. It wasn't. it took me two weeks just to work out how to get up the uneven, steep steps to my house. Only two of them, but there might as well have been a hundred for all I was able to get from the street to the door. No. Distance itself is the easy bit. It's the change in the pattern that is the hardest for the less mobile to manage. An upward incline is exhausting. I met my neighbour walking down the hill as I was walking up it yesterday. My neighbour was facing a possible permanent paralysis 6 months ago, from a combination of injuries to his lower back. He has been doing gruelling physiotherapy 24/7 to regain movement, and his progress has been extraordinary - a testiment to his steely determination, an inspiration to us all. His wife was walking next to him and she waved to me as we approached. He's just done his first hill walk! She called to me. It's exhausting, he said, with humour and a touch of surprise in his voice. No surprise to me. A hill incline that the able bodied barely register, is a huge barrier to the less mobile. But even that isn't the toughest challenge. It's the variations in the terrain - the cracks in the pavements. When I had my first child, the midwife advised me to take the pram out without the baby in it for my first ever outing, and push it to the end of the street and back, just to familiarise myself with the lumps and bumps in the sidewalk. I thought she was completely nuts till I tried it. When I was on crutches, every tree root creeping from its bed to the houses, was lethal. Every broken flagstone was extra effort to negotiate my way round. Every gap between the tiles was a trap for my crutch or for my one mobile but very tired foot. Make my way to the station? For three months it was all I could do to make it to my neighbour's house. We have no idea just how hard it is to get around till we are challenged ourselves.  I was out of action myself for six months, and it took me a further year to achieve full mobility again after my operation to rebuild my foot. I didn't just get a new foot (and a new lease of life) out of it. I also gained an insight I didn't ask for and could not have appreciated any other way, of the daily grinding difficulty of being less than fully mobile. It is really, really hard. Guys: an Easter message to you all. Stop worrying about whether you can afford those Louboutins, and take five seconds to be grateful your feet will take you somewhere uncomplainingly, whatever footwear you choose to encase them in. Perspective. I'm just saying.

Mini skirts and margaritas

QVC shopping channel. It is a total mystery to me. QVC is what I turn to when I am in my bedroom putting on make up or applying polish to my toenails and want something random to watch. The format is generally the same - it always includes a presenter so full of enthusiasm for the product she comes over a bit like a TV evangelist, and the patter is just incredible. It is, like, literally non stop chatter about the must have cardigan, lawnmower, blusher or weight reducing vibratone. Today as I flicked it on while wandering around my bedroom wondering what to wear for my evening out, I hear Trinny Woodall on the TV publicising her Trinny and Susannah clothes like mad. She's doing a pretty good job at it too. The most awesome feature is the way every time the camera goes back to her, she has managed a quick change into another of the outfits she wants to sell. Respect. Trinny's focus is on older women who worry about the size of their boobs or their tummy, which basically, is pretty much everybody over the age of 12.  She tells us that older women with big boobs want to try and draw the attention away from them a bit. I have generally noticeable boobs so I start to pay attention. Then she says, that one of the many evil consequences of menopause, is the loss of your waist. Then she goes on to share that she will not wear a dress that stops above the knee because her knees "talk to each other". I am now horrified. I am not yet approaching fifty, but menopause is in the ball park so I strip and do a quick, paranoid self evaluation. My knees are reassuringly round. I definitely have a waist. And yes my boobs are, well, boob shaped, and it's true that I would like to wear garments that they are not going to fall out of during conversation, but otherwise I am not in any mood to swathe them in triple poly lycra ("poly", for the uninitiated, appears to be the modern, posh term for "polyester". Don't Be Fooled). I turn back to my wardrobe. Well. I was going to wear my black Levis with a bright colour block t shirt and a black and white cotton biker jacket my niece conned me into buying at River Island last year during a girlie shopping trip. But I am so horrified by the impending downward spiral of my post menopause body, that I decide extreme measures are needed. I fish out from the back of the wardrobe, a lacy black miniskirt. I am fully aware that black lace is now Very Last Season but I do not care. I put it on, throw a black loose knit sweater on top, sheer black tights and knee high black suede boots, ropes of purple necklaces and I am good to go. Husband gulps slightly and asks whether he is a bit underdressed for our evening out. I reassure him, then steer him towards a cocktail bar, where we order margaritas, knock them back, listen to the relentlessly 80s music, and congratulate ourselves on having  challenged the inevitability of our impending middle age. Later on I sit in the Almeida Theatre watching King Charles III thinking, I'll bet nobody else staggered out of a cocktail bar minutes before hauling themselves up to the Circle with a plastic jug of tap water and an ice pack. I may be approaching menopause but one thing has not changed in me: tell me how things ought to be, and I will produce a stick of dynamite and put it right under the backside of Conventional Wisdom. Next stop: what happened to my leather bra top?

Big Boobs and Buttercream

It was really beautiful weather yesterday. Warm with a cooling breeze, sunny and flowery. Waking to this Saturday balminess after weeks of rain and a lot of corporate travel involving squashing myself into budget aeroplanes so small your handluggage is measured, this was too good an opportunity to miss. I promptly jettisoned all my dutiful chore related Saturday plans, climbed into tie dye shorts and a tank top, and took to the streets. Halfway to a shop to stock up on peanut butter so I could treat my kids to chocolate peanut butter squares, I am ogled. Unmistakeably. A pudgy guy standing outside a DIY shop stares at me, slack jawed, his eyes fixed on my tits. Now here is a thing. I have always had average sized boobs. But lately, well, they've grown a bit. Age and all. They're not, you know, silicone city, but they are more noticeable than they were, and a growing population of locals appears to be taking an interest in them, principally of course as the weather warms and I shed layers of clothes. Having my boobs ogled is not an attention I crave in life. I hate it. On my most recent work trip, on the way back I was seated next to two Korean guys who did not bother to disguise their delight at being sat too uncompromisingly closely next to a woman of, shall we say, slightly more European proportions. Luckily, budget travel tends to denude you of social skills, so as gross as they became, I was confidently able to match them in pared down rudeness. We glowered at each other for the duration of the flight, me contemptuously, them slightly more laciviously. Anyway. Back to the street. On my way back from the shop, plastic bag of peanut butter jars in my hand, Sleazoid Git has found a few of his mates and now they are all ranged outside the DIY shop, staring at me, hands in their pockets. I see them out of my peripherals, debate a minute, turn my head towards them, and stick my middle finger up. The key to doing this by the way,is to behave nonchalant. Very important not to betray anger in an ogling situation. When performing the motion, you need to do it almost incidentally. I achieve this and the bunch of Losers With Little In Their Lives puff on their fags and look away, at least for a few seconds. This does little to assuage my anger though. Let's be clear that even in 2014 after decades of self determination for women, it can be bloody hard enough without the extra aggro of not being able to walk your local streets without intimidation. I am still simmering when I walk through the door and I conclude that peanut butter squares are not going to be sufficiently cathartic. Instead I make buttercream, Magnolia Bakery style. The important factor in buttercream is that it takes ages to make. Whisk the butter for ages. Add chocolate and whisk for ages. Add vanilla and whisk for ages. By the time you finish, wrist permanently fractured, what you have is a concoction so light and creamy you can hardly believe you started with a slab of butter a packet of icing sugar. The ingredients are transformed in the most extraordinarily alchemic process. And since it is a fine line between light and creamy, and marshmallow fluffy, you need to not take your eye off the ball. You have to concentrate.   which makes it the perfect baking solution to a sexism induced bad mood. I bake a chocolate sponge cake to put my buttercream on, and then just sit back and look at it. Not for eating, this one. It's for admiring. Baking as anger management.

Chocolate Chestnut cake

My fridge freezer broke down a few days ago. A spectacular suicide, beginning with an unaccountable ticking noise that you barely notice as you slope into the kitchen at 6am on a working morning, that then, bit by bit, penetrates your consciousness while you put the kettle on. Then you take one fatal step to the side and slip ingloriously on 6 hours of defrosted fish juice, on to your butt.  It was food armageddon. Thereafter followed one of the most stressful and miserable days I have had in quite a while. Caling round for a repair mechanic willing to turf out for a refridgerator celebrating its 11 birthday this year. Forking out a callout fee while being told that the compressor has given way and will cost more than three hundred quid to replace - a death knell for my beloved Maytag Admiral. Despairing looks at piles of defrosted fish, meat and vegetables. But hey. It's only food at the end of the day, right? A very kind neighbour loans me a fridge/freezer that is temporarily empty, and I fill the fridge part with my defrosted stuff. I throw out half of the fridge contents and look at the rest. A lot of milk, butter, cheese. I have a little think. I take all the fish back out of the fridge. I fry, bake or poach it, and put it back in the freezer. That's a week of dinners sorted. Yay. I work through my recipes for cakesthat use shedloads of milk and/or butter. I  rustle up a milk tart (see earlier post for detail). I use up my warm ricotta and mascarpone in a white chocolate cheesecake. I use up the sour cream on the Magnolia Bakery recipe for sour cream breakfast buns. And then I decide to make a chocolate chestnut cake. What has happened is that I have channelled all my frustration and stress into a conveyer belt of Melinda cake classics, and I am now on a roll. I want to make something new. Sod the fridge. I head out to the nearest supermarket and scour it for pureed chestnut. I make for the internet and spend a happy hour comparing recipes. Finally I light on Nigella's chocolate chestnut cake recipe. I like this one because it is flourless. It uses loads and loads of egg white, whisked and whisked and then folded carefully into my concoctin of chestnut, egg yolk, sugar, butter and melted chocolate. And it rises, elegantly and fragilely, and turns into a mousse-y, rich amazingness that makes me totally forget for a few minutes what prompted me to try it out when I had already made two other cakes and 16 sour cream breakfast buns.I can't honestly taste much chestnut. But I guess this is a triumph of form over content. The texture of pureed chestnut gives punch to the lightness provided by the egg white. I guess. Who cares? It is a Thing of Beauty, another for my Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame, a cake born out of adversity (ok, I know. Just an exploding fridge freezer. But I am a foodie. Loss of a fridge is like loss of an arm). This would be my personal definition of making lemonade out of lemons.

Pecan Pie. Because I Can.

When I was around 19 years old, a guy I was going out with finished with me. He said it was because I was fat. As it happens I was having about as much fun hanging out with him as he appeared to be having hanging out with me so there was not too much love lost on either side, and I also have an abiding suspicion that, having cottoned on to the underwhelming vibe he was getting from me, he was probably bailing out before he was shown the door.  And the comment was probably part of an attempt on his part to exorcise his resentment. But at 19 you don't ponder things on quite such an empathetic level and I was mildly disconcerted. I made my way over to see a friend and told him about it. He advised me that the only possible response to this would be to head for the nearest chocolate shop. We were in Luxembourg at the time - the dumping of the relationship, and me, had taken place in a cheap hotel somewhere in the city centre during a European student conference of some kind, I forget which - and the de rigeur chocolate was Suchard. So we hit the Suchard shop, drank memorably foamy hot chocolate, and then, mixing our seasons up madly, bought sachets of Suchard mini Easter Eggs and sale price chocolate Santa Claus figures, brought them back to my hotel room, and ate the lot. I was reminded of this episode a few weeks back when I went to see a registrar to have my knee injury reviewed. Registrars are all, in my experience, tall, distant, knowledgeable in a general way, totally unclued on your case, and far too busy to care about it. This one was no exception - brisk shake of the hand, open up the file on my history which he has not taken a look at at all until right now, a few stupid questions which I reply to by directing him to said file from between clenched teeth, and a quick diagnosis and a flourishing signature on the discharge form. Registrars hate to ask any questions because they are too busy to answer them. This is an orthopaedic clinic and they have at least 50 people to see after me, all of them in the clinic, on their 3rd hour of waiting, and baying for his blood. I have sympathy for his dilemma. The problem is that this pressure results in a series of clipped generalities rather than targeted, context specific advice. He stands up to go. So can I go back to my usual exercise, I ask. Well I wouldn't run any more, he says, and exists at speed, stage left. I ponder this on the bus home and when I get in, the first thing I do, the very first thing, is register for the 2014 Race For Life. It is only a 5k run, so we are not talking Mad Marathon. But I know that what the registrar has given me is generalised advice. He has not taken into account the frequency with which I exercise, or my sheer bloody minded determination to overcome challenges. He clocks my age, looks at my knee, and makes a snap judgement. I don't judge this harshly. I do this to myself a lot so why wouldn't he do it to me? If I want others to look me in the eye, I need to do the same to myself. I leaf through my favourite cookbook. Pecan Pie. I have never attempted this. It is one of my fave puddings and despite my increasingly complex repertoire I have always considered a pecan pie to be somehow beyond me. Time to put my money where my mouth is. I study the recipe, it becomes increasingly clear that this is going to be a walk in the park compared to the 15 stage marquise au chocolat, I stick the IPod on - Loudly - don my favourite apron (siren , don't-mess-with-me red), and start chopping a mountain of pecans. My pecan pie, when it comes out, looks more like a tart than a pie. It has a decidedly European, rather than American air. I conclude that rather than a baking failure this is simply me interpreting recipes with my own signature style. I cut a slice. It is delicious. It is lemony and buttery and nutty, and the pastry is sweet and mellow. It is fantastic. I lean back and sip my tea, and allow myself to imagine that if I can defy my registrar to run 5k for a cancer charity, and bake my nemesis recipe, then the list of things I would want to do but consider myself too humble/incapable/old/cool to do, has just got much, much longer.

Mousse

When I was in my teens I used to load up my spectacularly huge hair with styling mousse. The stickier the better. When I got bored at school my favourite pastime was to crunch my hair in my palm and feel the shower of disentegrating solidified mousse fall like dust into my hand. My Maths teacher must have thought I had the worst dandruff in the world. Not to mention the noisiest curls. The mousse was so stiff you could literally hear my locks clang as they hit against each other while I walked from class to class. Well. I gave all that up once I passed that adolescent rebellion thing and developed some mature empathy. The kind that helps you to the realisation of what it is like for anyone around you when you have embalmed hair that you manually liberate over their pints of cider at the local pub. The older I have got, the less product I have used in my hair, the better looking, frankly, it has got. I was in a shopping centre yesterday and was stopped twice by admiring punters wanting to know what I was putting in my hair. Umm, nothing really, I say. They look at each other disbelievingly. I want to tell them this is not faux middle aged modesty but as this is clearly not going to be bought, I direct them to the stickiest hair mousse Boots has to offer. Anything to keep my fellow citizen happy. Which brings me, not entirely logically, to the sort of mousse that you eat. I made a chocolate marquise yesterday (about which I have already waxed lyrical) - this is a cake you make in two parts, the flourless base first, which then has to cool completely before you make the top half as a chocolate mousse. Then the whole thing has to chill overnight to set completely. I made the bottom half, stared at it admiringly as it cooled slowly and beautifully on my stove, and then thought, I can't stand this any longer. I have to make a chocolate mousse. Who cares if it's not the one I end up pouring on the cake? A houseful of adolescents ensures swift despatch of all extraneous baking matter. I look up recipes and discover, not wholly surprisngly, that every celeb chef has at least one mousse recipe to offer. And there is a bewildering array. You can make sugar free mousse, egg white free mousse, egg free mousse, mousse with knobs on, mousse with alcohol and mousse with fruit. Blimey. I settle on Nigella's offering on the grounds that it's quick, and that it uses marshmallows - I mean, what can be more fun than chucking marshmallows into a bowlful of melting chocolate? And I do have fun with it, and put it in the fridge, and it tastes amazing, and by evening, as predicted, it's all gone. So I start on the second one, the one that will go on top of the dark, flourless base. This time it is the Organic Green and Black recipe, and they call for a ridiculous quantity of eggs. I whisk the whites, whisk the cream, melt the chocolate, add the vanilla, fold it all carefully together, pour it on the base, put it in the fridge, and then turn back to see a bowl full of egg yolks that should have been added to the chocolate. I have, in fact, by default, made the Jamie Oliver mousse from an Organic Green and Black recipe. Which makes me feel vaguely disloyal. But not for long,because the marquise is a triumph. Your hair looks fab, says my mate as she digs in. What are you putting on it?

Luggage

I joined a Board of an international bank a few years back. I hadn't been on a board of anything as posh as a bank before - just a few scuzzy charities, some student movements etc. But I figured a bank was the real deal and I had better dress the part. I fished out some smart grey clothes, and shopped for some restrained Mac eyeshadow pots. I put it all together with my smartly bound papers and briefing notes and looked around for an appropriately businesslike receptacle to put it in.  I searched through my cupboards and the spare room and the loft. All I could find was a battered backpack, a pair of huge family suitcases and an old shabby leather thing so preposterous it defied description (and, for clarification, definitely not something I brought into the relationship).  Eventually I decided that since the meeting I was attending at this bank was only for a day, then some over the shoulder holdall thing would do, I would shove it under the table and nobody would see it. The next day I pitched up at City airport, beautifully dressed in a smart two piece suit, my IPad and briefing papers in my green Kate Spade bag, and then slung over it was a filthy once-cream coloured Shanghai Tang beach bag, purple on the inside, containing 24 hours worth of beauty products, PJs and change of clothing. They won't see, they won't see, I told myself everytime I glimped this horror hanging over my shoulder. I walked into the boardroom of the bank and stopped short. Every other person there had an immaculate mini wheelie. Mini wheelies. I never even knew such a thing existed. It immediately became clear to me that Luggage Maketh the Man (not to mention the Woman). Particularly once it became clear we were all going to be put up for the night at an impossibly staid, high end hotel, complete with marble and appalling piano playing at the brass-laden bar. This was a hotel where the women wore mink furs and had Russian accents. Positively nobody checked out with their belongings scrunched into a scruffy beach bag. I spent most of my overnighter in a hot blush. It was the first time in my life that the quality of my luggage meant anything to me. How had this happened? It was truly incredible that stepping up to a new institutional environment made something as otherwise innocuous as luggage become a career defining issue. Suffice to say that the minute I was off the plane I headed for the nearest luggage shop and got me a black, swish, mini wheelie. After which I had no problem feeling right at home in the overheated board room with its high tech individual powerpoint screens and its high end biscuits. Luggage.maketh the capitalist.

Baking therapy

As I was building my fabulous meringue chocolate semifreddo yesterday (of which, more later) I was listening to a programme on the radio, one of those multidimensional newsy shows that segue neatly from one apparently shallow topic to the other. It sounds frippery but if you listen closely enough, you pick up unexpected gems. This was one of those. This was a segment all about baking, and was telling us what dedicated and enthused bakers like myself already know, which is that it can provide huge therapeutic benefits. Then they cut to an interview with a bunch of people, kids and young people mostly, who attend a regular baking group. What these people all had in common, was bereavement. They had all lost someone they loved, a grandmother, sibling or parent, and baking was a way of helping them manage their grief. Speaking as someone who in the weeks after my sister died would routinely find myself in the kitchen at 3am sieving flour or melting chocolate just to be able to mesmerise myself out of the pain, this struck immediate chords. Something else struck me too. One of the kids said, I lost my Dad two and a half years ago, so we are just coming down the hill. Really? There is something as logical and predictable as a hill in all this messy bereavement experience? I dunno, I am in the second year of my loss and if there is a hill somewhere I have yet to climb it. I characterise my loss more like what I imagine someone feels when they've been lost in the harshest of deserts for so long they can barely remember what water looks like. But on the other hand, as I listen to some of those kids recount memories of their loved ones at the same time as talking you through the cheese an onion quiche dough they are kneading simultaneously, perhaps it is nothing like as harsh. Perhaps after a year or so, it becomes more like a comfort blanket. You prefer to exist in those memories, you bury yourself in regret and in past experiences. My parents had a friend once, when I was much younger, who had lost his wife, like, 12 years previously or something. And all her clothes were still hung up in their bedroom. He hadn't touched a thing. He was a truly lovely man, I treated him like an  honorary Uncle, and I remember thinking how touching and romantic it was, and what depth of character it demonstrated. But wasn't there also something in there about just preferring to live in that cocoon? The truth is, I thought to myself as I folded my crushed meringue into my whipped, chocolatey double cream, that moving on is such a massive step, it takes such immense energy, and it needs you to work so hard at repackaging that past experience so you know where to put it in your new life that you will now go on to live without that person who used to share a part of it with you, that just going day to day with memories in the front of your head is just, well, easier. More familiar. And I am sure there is a nice big chunk of denial tucked away in there too. I don't think there is necessarily much wrong in living your life in your past. I have a hard enough time tucking away all the years I had my sister in my life and moving on, and it's not straightforward, and it can be really hard some days, and I am still having quite long periods where I will find a photograph of her somewhere and find I've spent most of the day sitting there staring at it. I just would rather imagine that she would prefer me to get on with it. Getting on with it, isn't about forgetting someone. It's about taking a slightly unsteady leap into a new future, your memories tucked safely away for you to protect, rather than live through.  When I sieve flour, whip cream, melt butter, add espresso coffee to chocolate and watch it catch and come together; whenever I roll truffles, blind bake a perfect pastry dough for an onion tart, whisk a million eggs for the lightest white chocolate icing ever, create the many layers of almond and egg that make up a frangipane; it creates a space for me to envisage that future, and make it more real, consequently less scarey, and crucially less guilty, to step into. Work does not provide this space. On the contrary, when I work it's a vehicle for obliterating these thoughts entirely. When my sister was really sick I worked stupid hours. Anything to displace the pain. And frankly, washing, ironing and vaccuming don't do it either. There may be people out there for whom ironing is a creative process but I do not count myself among their number. I pour my semifreddo into a lined bread tin and put it in the freezer. It is beautiful. It shines and froths and I cannot believe it is going to be 7 hours before anyone can try it (this is why it is my first time making one of these things. Instant gratification is what drove me to bake cakes in the first place and a semifreddo is the antithesis of instant gratification. Seven hours might as well be seven years when your taste buds are awake). I am dead pleased with myself for pulling off this new recipe, experimenting with it a bit, and working through a bit, just a bit, of the regret and guilt that continue to haunt me. Baking is never just about the cake.

Commuters are depressed

I read some research today that concluded that people whose daily travel exceeds fifteen minutes are more depressed. I really hope the people who did this research were not paid to reach this conclusion as any one of the millions of people who approach the tube each morning and evening could have worked that one out for free. I won't amplify on the usual stories of rude people, bad mannered people, people who sneeze over you and wipe their snot on their jeans, people who ogle you, people who won't give up their seat for a pregnant woman or maintain a studious obliviousness to a less mobile person who gets on a busy train and clearly needs a seat. Instead I will relate to you what happened one just one commute, my commute home this evening, as a sample of this source of misery. I descend into Charing Cross station. It stinks of pee. Someone walking past the entrance I am descending into, flicks a lit cigarette end down into it, and it hits me on the side of my hair, singeing it slightly. En route into the tube station I pass a man with straggly hair, unkempt clothes and a beer can. Hallo sexy, he mumbles at me, dribbling slightly. I head for the ticket barriers. A man cuts in in front of me. A man behind attempts to tailgate me, thus avoiding having to pay for his fare. I thump him with my elbow (a maneouver I have spent years honing. Plenty of experience. That's the key). I walk down the escalator. Politely, I encourage a tourist to move out of the way so I can complete my walk down. I head through the tunnel.  A registered busker is blasting Phil Collins covers with an untuned electric guitar. I narrowly miss my train, the doors of which shut uncompromisingly on my nose. I walk up the platform to await the next. A mouse scampers over my feet. Then another follows. They disappear under a bench with fragments of crisp packet in their teeth. The next train arrives. I get on it. The only seat available is next to a woman in a mini skirt and boob tube, eating a chilli dog. The man on my right is listening to music with crap headphones so we all get to critique his musical taste. The train crawls from stop to stop without explanation. We get to my station. Hundreds bundle out. People coming down the stairs knock against people going up. It is pouring. I tap my Oyster card against the Reader but it isn't working. I retrace my steps, go to the ticket office, get my card checked. Back to the reader. Tap the card. It works. I walk up the station exit past an unkempt man clutching a beer can. Hallo Sexy, he mumbles. Commuters are depressed. Are you surprised????