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.