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 But, sugar addict though I am, the temptation is yet superseded by something very different when I bake.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.