Buying cakes

I bake a lot.  Recently I have scaled new heights with my chocolate marquise and my frangipane tart. Every time I pull a cake out of the oven, I feel a bit like women who emerge from a frippery boutique with a Versace shopping bag over one crooked elbow. It's not a thing I have been inclined to do all my life - I really only caught on to baking around 10 or 11 years ago, and spent at least the first 2 or 3 years producing the same cheesecake over and over, taken from a Sainsburys recipe card, to which I stuck rigidly, terrified of producing a total confectionery ruin. A Nigella Lawson cookery book, bought by a friend and meant to convey irony, changed all that. I went from broadening my repertoire of cheesecakes, across to sponges, tarts, biscuits, stack meringues...and have never looked back. But even as my skill has increased, my range of ingredients has become more ambitious - spelt flour cookies anyone? - my proliferation of baking produce ever more abundant, still given teh choice, if I wanted to give myself a serious treat, I would not hesitate to take myself off to the nearest artisan patisserie, and splash out. Today is my birthday, and I have done some brilliant things - I climbed to the top of Primrose Hill, watched the sun rise over the London Eye, raised my eyes heavenward to offer thanks for the amazing things that had happened in the previous year, and sucked in the pre-polluted air of the morning as if literally preparing myself for the year to come. I wandered back down and tucked into a posh Italian brunch. I hopped across the road to a spa and emerged, one back/neck massage later, 2 feet above the ground, so unwound I could barely see straight. I wandered up through Camden stables, picking up improbable t shirts, psychedlic bags, scented earrings (yes, I know), and frisbees with holes in the middle. I had a huge and rather lovely latte at the Jewish Museum with my parents - the Jewish Museum is a pretty fab place to visit for its exhibitions, but if you do go, you need to give 20 mins over to their latte. Lattes are not things that Jews are best known for, which makes the excellence of these all the more worth a go. I walked back through Camden all the way to Hampstead, infiltrating posh communities with my high street boots. And reached my final destination before returning home to bury myself in back to back Jane Austen movies. A patisserie. Try to imagine just how indulgent it is for someone who does all her own baking, to enter a patisserie and stare at the range of confection. What to go for? An obvious red line would be, nothing that I can already make myself. But that is a mistake. The best patisserie will be using ingredients I can't source or could if I wanted but draw the line at forking out a tenner for a half bar of  couverture chocolate just for a brownie. So I look long, hard and greedily at the range, and here is what I buy. A tarte au citron. A tartelette au chocolat. A frangipane aux amandes (which is a funny name, because aren't ALL frangipanes made with almond?) A millefeuille. And a dark chocolate and pecan brownie. Nothing outlandish, nothing, in fact, that I have not already tried. But all looking absolutely perfectly balanced. No drips of icing, as you would find around my millefeuille. Shavings of lemon rind on the tarte au citron, which I can rarely be bothered to do, or I go for ruining the finesse by shaving white chocolate over the top instead; a brownie that is so dark and gooey looking I am guessing one bite and I won't be able to look at chocolate again for a month. I will try all of these with my kids when they come home from school, over a pot of tea and another of hot chocolate, and we will put our feet up on chairs and let chocolate dribble down our chins and laugh lots and lots. And I will make mental notes about lemon rind and artisanal couverture, and reset the bar for my baking, for another year. This is not buying cakes, as you might pull off a box out of the bakery section in your local supermarket. This is an indulgence, a learning experience, a family moment, and sheer investigative joy, all rolled into one.

It's All About Me

My birthday is coming up in a few days' time. This is a very big deal for me. I usually begin thinking about it in November, planning it throughout December, and anticipating it - loudly, repetitively, obsessively, and with unbridled glee - throughout January. January is the month of misery for nearly everyone, satiated by their Xmas excess, penniless, miserable in the British weather, bowed by the commute and the grey inevitability of work, temporarily obliterated by Xmas lights, gifts, and arguments over how to achieve the perfect roast potato. Ah but the joy of being empowered to think about such mundane things as a potato. In January I glow like a neon lightbulb. I have Birthday to look forward to. It always has several components and runs over several days. It always includes a trip to a spa, drinks with girlfriends, dinner with Husband, a long walk somewhere rugged or edgy, some frivolous shopping, a fab skyline, a bout of family encounters, and presents. Not just presents from other people to me, but presents from me to me. I pick something quirky and special and something reflective of my mood. This year it will almost certainly be the silver (not plated - the genuine article) earrings, featuring gilded cages with a monkey inside them. They are less heinous than they sound, principally because they are tiny and beautifully made, and when I wear them I know people will be squinting at them trying to determine, as covertly as they can, what they are (is that a MAN inside it? A bird? or what?) My birthday sounds like a week of egocentric me-celebration, founded on commercialism, doesn't it? It isn''t. It is a week to which I devote a period of reflection. A thinking process about the year that has passed: what sort of person was I? What challenges did I face? Which of them hit me completely unawares? What were the highs, the lows? What did I learn? And a period of meditation about the year to come. What do I know that it will hold for me? What do I want to be, how do I want to grow? I process these thoughts during my walks through edgy parts of town or up to the top of Primrose Hill,I let them drift through my head while prone on a table having my head massaged, I consider my challenges while staring at myself in a pink tutu in the changing room of a frippery boutique for Ladies Who Lunch (actually I have no intention of squeezing myself into a tutu, especially not a pink one, but I will do a lot of presentational trying-on of clothes destined for someone very differently shaped/aged from me, and I will really enjoy having the time and inclination to do it). My last year has been so tough. So, so challenging. My first year as the eldest child my first year coming to terms with life without my elder sister. And let's not kid ourselves that I'm over it either. I wonder in fact, if I will ever be over it. I have in fact moved on to a new stage in my life, one where my relationships with my parents, my younger sister, my niece and nephew, are all shifting inexorably. With huge positive outcomes too, but also with sadness. I may have the loveliest relationship with my niece, but let's not kid ourselves that if I were offered the opportunity to trade it in for 5 minutes with my elder sister, just five - I would relinquish it in a heartbeat. And then I'd donate those five minutes to my niece, for a chance for her to tell her Mother how amazing a time she is having at university, for my sister to register her joy at my niece's success in getting there at such a hard time. That same year has also been a year of family joy too, in the achievements and milestones of my own kids. It was the year my husband grew a beard,weathered the derision, and emerged looking remarkably sleek. And the year I made a profound and exciting leap in my career. In this next week I am looking forward to thinking about how my career change has rocketed my confidence. How my hair, now twice as long as it was 18 months ago (my version of my Husband's beard...) has changed the way I choose my clothes. How there might be something behind my persistence in repainting my toenails purple (my elder sister's favourite colour). I'll torture myself a bit over the instances when I've blown it and been horribly rude to car repairmen, hapless teachers and oblivious drivers, and I will hug myself for the random times I have smiled at a depressed commuter, given someone directions, restored a lost and wailing child to her Mum in a huge supermarket, called someone and told them I found their cat dead in my garden and took it to a vet, turned in a wallet full of cash and cards, dropped in the street, to the Police. Like everyone, I have potential for good things. And potential for meanness, petty mindedness, wandering introspection and superfluity.I am as likely to self flagellate over things I should or shouldn't have done, as I am to celebrate things I did, or didn't do. This year I will aim for new reasons to wake up each day with excitement, and at the same time I will think about blowing off at my fellow humans just a bit less than last year. However much of what I work through actually gets delivered remains to be tested, not least by those challenges in life that you have no idea are out there. But that week I'm going to take to deliberate over them? That will be, as it is every year, my priceless, personal experience, my annual Me Week, just one week out of 52 that I devote to my personal MOT. Bring it on.

Chocolate Marquise

French cake recipes pride themselves on being extra complicated. It's taken me a while to work out why this is and my conclusion is that it is to put off anybody who is not French from making them. This particular recipe is one I found in my Organic Green & Black recipe book. My youngest child bought this book for me for my birthday, he got it from WH Smith - I know because I was there at the time, pulled it out, gave it to him and said, buy this for me for my birthday (when you are the Mother of boys, you cotton on pretty quickly that the direct approach is the only way to guarantee yourself any kind of present. Hints will not do the trick. My elder sister used to write her birthday list on yellow post it notes which she would put on the wall all the way up the stairs to her kids' bedrooms).  The cookery book had been heavily discounted - it started its life in the world at the princely sum of 15 quid, and by the time my son took it to the cashier it was a post Xmas bargain basement offering at a fiver. I figured at the time it would be because it contained risible recipes thinly disguised as marketing ploys to get you to buy more Organic Green and Black chocolate, and I wasn't a million miles away from being right, though I have made a fair few of their recipes using Divine, Lindt and on one occasion good old Cadbury's, so it's not a given, and no I didn't feel particularly guilty about abusing their branding efforts so cavalierly.  Anyway. I was wrong about the recipes being risible. There are a fair few in there that require dedication, precision, and single minded commitment, and this is one of them. The recipe suggests this is one only for the serious minded patisserie chef and you can see the subliminal sub text - if you don't fall into this category, don't even THINK of trying this one. But years of being a female executive, a multitasking Mum, an orthopaedic patient in a chaotic waiting room, a veteran supermarket queuer, a long distance frequent flyer, and an all round manager of life's unpredictabilities, have fostered in me a deep sense of rebellion. ANY message that says, this is not for you, draws me like a magnet. Not French enough to attempt a marquise? Marquise it is then. My current favourite apron (fire engine red, deep pockets, satisfyingly comprehensive coverage, and the large chested among you will know exactly what I mean by this) goes on, my utensils come out, music at the appropriate tempo - upbeat, loud but not too mad - goes on, kitchen door closes, and I am Ready For Business. A marquise is a thing requiring a careful eye - no playing Scrabble on the IPad or chatting with friends on the phone, while whisking your eggs. Take your eye off this for a second and it is no longer a marquise but a pudding/cake. A marquise is a confection of eggs, butter, chocolate and sugar on the bottom half, which is baked and then left to cool completely, while the top half is a chocolate mousse. The chocolate mousse, consisting of melted very, very, VERY dark chocolate with whipped cream, butter, icing sugar and whipped egg whites added in bit by careful bit to achieve exactly the right consistency, goes on top of the flour less bottom half. Then it is put in the fridge overnight. Then you immerse a spatula knife in boiling hot water, ease it in around the sides of the cake, and pull it out gently of its springform tin. Which liberates the most incredible work of art - all unctuous darkness on the bottom, and frothy richness on the top. Dollop creme fraiche on the top, not because it needs it for taste, more for the aesthetics of white on top of dark - and dig in, using a dessert fork. I never use dessert forks, or even spoons most of the time. I live with boys, remember? Our hands are shovels. But this marquise, it is the prince of dessert cakes and dammit, we are using dessert forks. Once I've excavated them from the loft, out of whichever wedding present box they have been hibernating for the last couple of decades. I made this marquise in around 5 hours, including baking time, not because it takes five hours, but because the process is mesmerising. There is something truly magnetic about seeing a bowl of chocolate, a bowl of whipped cream, a bowl of butter, a bowl of icing sugar, and a bowl of whipped, peaked egg whites, come together in such a froth of palate-adoring chocolately wonderfulness. If I add together the cost of all the ingredients it comes to more than a quarter more than the cost of the book that suggested I was unworthy of making it. Oh, and I used Divine chocolate mixed with Organic Green and Black. There you have it.  A jet lagged Jewish Mother from North London turns out a chocolate marquise, the richness of which has felled her family. I defy any Frenchwoman to beat that for achievement.

Less customer service please

I am going on the first of two business trips in the space of a week, and I am stressed. All full time working Mums know how close to the edge they sail in their multitasking worlds. When rhythm is established, all is calm. You know exactly at what point you will put the washing on in between getting back from a full day of work and a hellish commute, starting a lamb tagine because you are not one of those Ready Meal copouts, checking homework, checking for headlice, and finding something to wear for tomorrow before you go to bed, because you know damn well that if you leave it till the next morning, you will try on 34 outfits in increasing frustration before pulling out what you think will do and then finding when you slump back in your garish Northern line seat that your jacket is missing a button, your skirt zip is at half mast, and you are wearing fishnet tights. For a job interview. So it's all a matter of balance, and it takes only one thing, for the whole thing to keel over into the abyss. Drivers of the apocalypse include, child illness, a tube strike, the school closing because it snowed for five minutes, the washing machine breaking down, or, in my case, one too many business trips. This one also rips out half of my weekend - I fly on a Sunday morning, arrive Sunday evening, and have to pretend like I am not in such urgent need of bed that if I didn't purse my lips together during the meetings I have gone straight to I will flop over into my coffee and dribble on the table, all because I have gone back one too many time zones and no my body cannot just adjust - it couldn't when I was in my teens and it sure as hell can't now. But my immediate problem is, that I have 24 hours instead of 48 to perform close to a million chores, plus pack AND calm down sufficiently not to make everyone else in my daily life suffer. I manage this pretty well with my partner, kids, the postman and my neighbours. But I crack at the supermarket checkout of the local high end shop I often frequent simply because it shares a car park with my gym, and time is of the essence. I would so rather shoot up the road and be yelled at by bored and unhelpful staff at the bogstandard cheapo equivalent but the time it takes for me to get there makes me shudder when I know I need that time to get passport photos done for one child and ferry the other to a tutor and sew the buttons back on the jacket I want to travel in....so I brace myself, and head into the high end supermarket. Why should it be so bad? This is the shop that gives you free coffee and a paper, for goodness sake. Ah, but in return you have to endure their relentless friendliness, their checkout staff trained to hold a PhD viva with you on every bloody item in your trolley. Morning, she says to me. Thank you SO much for bringing your own bags. 'S OK, I mutter, summoning a gargoyle like grin, hoping this will pass for a one stop shop of pleasanteries and she will now just get on with the business of scanning my overpriced peanut butter. But I know that this is just the beginning. I brace myself. Fennel, she beams. We have bags of four small fennel bulbs if you prefer. No thanks, I say, gritting my teeth (subtext: because if I wanted four small fennels I would have chosen them. I just want one. Just SCAN the damn thing!!) That's a lot of eggs, she comments. Are you sure you don't want the special 16 pack? Shall I buzz for a special freezer bag for those peas?  In house magazine Madam? I crack. Noooo, I almost sob. I don't want the magazine!! She stares. But why not, she pleads. It's free. Because it's RUBBISH, I tell her. It's full of bogus offers to make you buy more bloody mini fennel and multibags of okra! It has recipes in it from 1972! It's so bloody twee with its sodding stories of how local housewives have recycled their fir cones it makes me want to puke! I just - want - to - pay - for - my - food. She gulps. I can see tears forming in her eyes. Oh Lord. I take a deep breath. I learned deep breaths recently in the Times How To Meditate special supplement, and it helps. How the busy executive achieves zen. OK, I say. I'll take the magazine. She brightens instantly. And would you like a special rain protective bag for it? Sure, I say. After all, it's not like I believe in conserving the environment or anything. I clap my hands over my mouth but it's too late. Her lips quiver again. Give me two, I say. Two bags. By the time I leave, I am exhausted. There is an important lesson in this. Mine is, to chill out. Miss the flight? Someone else can take those meetings. But there is a pretty important lesson for high end supermarkets too. Learn to spot the busy working Mum. And give her the damn food.

Annual post Xmas depression

This is supposed to be the week when marriage guidance services are at their busiest. Lots of people feeling the post Xmas downer and determining in the wintry gloom to do something about it. Those who aren't contemplating divorce, are steeling themselves for the return to work. The Northern line has never looked as miserable as it does in the first week of January. Normally, minimal etiquette is the order of the day - if you are going to sneeze, you put your hand over your mouth, and if someone pregnant gets on the train, give her a seat - but in the first week of January, it all goes out of the window. People are sunk into their New Year misery, mulling over resolutions they have no intention of keeping, bitterly regretting that gym membership they've just laid out megabucks for, sneezing with abandon into each others' faces. Now, I have prepared myself for this. My birthday is at the end of January and as I tend to devote an entire week to celebrating it, I have something to look forward, unlike my fellow commuters who have blown half a year's salary on Xmas presents and the next time they will be able to draw breath will be sometime around the Queen's birthday. But such is the pall of depression in my train into town that mere anticipation is insufficent to combat the grey shroud of Seasonal Affective Disorder. So I counter the mood by dressing like a box of Lego. I have splurged in the Xmas sales on clothes dotted with primary colours, and I wear them with clashy clashy coloured tights and sweaters. Today I wear a blue, green and yellow dress, which I accessorise with a siren red cardigan and forest green tights. Tomorow I have a blue and red dress, with blue boots and a purple scarf. Yesterday it was a yellow skirt and pink tights. Fellow commuters regard me with mild astonishment and some curl their lips. Maybe in contempt, but I like to think I am injecting a Willy Wonka like humour into their lives. One day some psychologist will publish a study linking the wearing of bright primary colour, with inner peace, and I will feature in the pictures on his/her powerpoint presentation.  I love wearing bright colours at all times of the year, but in January it is a public service.