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?