Home baking

"Have you ever eaten one of my sponge cakes?" Herself asks me, the other evening, as we are watching television.
"Nope," I say, swigging my beer.
"Didn't you know me when I used to bake sponge cakes and butterfly buns and flans and maringues?"
"Er... no."
"I shall make us a sponge cake at the weekend."

Come the weekend there was a crisis of ounces verses grams. I was entertaining my father in the other room and so I couldn't help much.

"Look it up on the Internet," I said.

An hour later I was eating.... something.... sponge-like....

"Do you like it?"
"Er... yes...."

I chewed at the lump of fruit-topped, cream-filled yellowish stuff. Having to chew or gnaw at a sponge cake is probably an indication that it hasn't come out right.

"I think I didn't get the measurements right," she said. "And I think there was something about folding the mixture rather than beating it."

I seprated my upper teeth from my lower ones with an effort, long enough to say:

"No, babe. It's fine, really."

There was a definite clunk when a piece of leftover spong hit the bottom of the kitchen bin. I could feel strange protestations starting up in my gut.

Herself Googled for sponge cake recipes.

"I know what went wrong!" she shouted in to the other room. "I'll make you a proper one tomorrow!"

So, today, I'm eating a wafer-thin sponge-cake that hasn't turned out either. But it is lighter than yesterday's.

"I know where I went wrong. I'll make another one tomorrow that will be right this time. I promise."

My gut is thanking Heaven that we're back at work on Tuesday. It might not have survived an extra day of sponge making.

"You can write about it," Herself said. "On condition you write a sequel when it turns out...."

Watch this space.

So I dropped me choccie bar... Big deal.

Thought I'd post something humorous about how God hates me cos I bit a chocolate bar this evening and hurt an already broken tooth (emphasis on how eating sweets is well known not to have an effect on tooth decay, of course). Then to add insult to dental injury, I dropped the rest of the chocolate bar on the floor.

In search of a suitable judgemental God image I could find nothing. Then I thought about a weeping image and found this website.

How peculiar.

Link: Weeping Gallery Dot Net

Dodging the bullet. Or not.

We were on the hunt for a bed for our teensy teeny guest bedroom today. A couple of weekends ago we went to a particular furniture showroom and picked one out. But we had to make sure of some measurements before we could put the cash on the nail as it were, so it took until today to pay for it and confirm an order. I'm sure the salesman thought "Yeah, right!" when we said we'd go away and come back, but we did! That's €375 we won't see again in a hurry. Nor, for that matter, will we see the bed because they haven't the colour we prefer in stock. I shall await their phone call of confirmation with bated breath.

The last time we went into the furniture store four doors up "just to have a look" we ended up buying a herd of leather furniture for €4,000. I should have known better than to look in there again today, but we need some refurbished dining room chairs. Of course "refurbished" can so easily turn into "replacement". And it's a teensy teeny step from "replacement chairs" to "whole new diningroom table and chairs". (I draw the line at "whole new diningroom table and chairs" and refuse absolutely the notion of "whole new diningroom suite, including chairs, table, sideboard and lamp.")

So, we're trying to find €1,500. And I only went into the store wanting six chairs.

Now it looks like those leather covered high-backed, sprung, diningroom chairs with the brown, distressed-effect diningroom table will just *have* to be bought.

My poor wage packet.

The eighth plague of Egypt

"I'm tired looking at the box of chocolates. Bring it into work."

So I dutifully obeyed. A two-pound box of Cadbury milk chocolates. General, ordinary sweets are something no-one eats among my workmates, until one actually goes looking for one. Then there are none left. Obviously they evaporate into the air or something, quite spontaneously.

"I'll be given out to by the Weight Watchers woman," was one complaint I heard. Nonetheless, the hand went into the box and made a selection.

"Who brought them in?" was the accusatory tone of another. It was accompanied by the sound of rummaging.

Yesterday I looked at the discarded box and wrapping. One whole day they had lasted, which is something of a record.

Sweets, groceries, soft-drinks, interrogations...

Mrs Elliot's shop in Edmondstown, just below the Reckitt's factory, was the local sweet shop for we kids for many years. It had a wider variety of confectionary than my uncle's pitch 'n'putt clubhouse, although Elliot's was further away. For a while it was a fair distance on foot, then the local gang acquired bicycles and it wasn't such a hardship to take a spin down there.

The shop, which was on the upper floor of a split-level house in a deep cutting by the roadside, had a decent shop window in which penny sweets, lollypops, and jars of other goodies were displayed. The narrow doorway opened into a dark hall, one deep step down, which had a counter and display to the left and a small window, curtained on the other side, which must have looked out from a room in the house. A simple bell push on the wall immediately ahead of the visitor by a door that led into the living quarters summoned Mrs Elliot if she was not already behind the counter.

I like bags of "Indian popcorn", which was just a regular variety covered in a sweet, syrupy, coloured food dye, and they cost 2p each. I also liked ice-cream, which Mrs Elliot sold by the individual pre-wrapped factory produced lolly, or cut herself from a block and served between two wafers. You could buy a 2p wafer or a 5p wafer, the difference being the thickness of the slice of ice-cream. My favourite, though, was the HB (hughes Brothers had a creamery and factory in the Rathfarnham area until very recently) "Golly" bar, which was a type of vanilla ice cream wrapped in a foil wrapper with lots of smiling gollywogs on it. I don't expect my Golly bar is sold any more in this politically correct age.

Mrs Elliot mostly catered for the nearby factory, and so cigarettes and a few grocery items were also stocked. She would sometimes make up a sandwich for Miss Eagan, if the teacher had forgotten to make lunch for herself that morning. I was sometimes deputised to walk down to Elliot's and ask her to make one up. It wasn't part of the service, but Mrs Elliot usually obliged.

I'm told she also sold individual tomatoes and single cigarettes to our miserly landlords. It wouldn't surprise me.

One thing that you could always rely upon was Mrs Elliot's appetite for gossip. Whether you were buying penny sweets or fetching a few groceries for teatime she would appear in her blond, curled hair and pinny and ask:

"How is your mother? Is she still working in the factory?"

I'd answer politely (as I'd been taught) and ask for another item from the list.

"How is your married sister? Where is she living?"

My mother used to ask me at the other end of the journey what Mrs Elliot had been saying.

"Ask her if her son is still living in the caravan!" she'd spit out, putting away the groceries. Mrs Elliot's son lived in a mobile home on a site near the house.

Interrogations aside, I used to enjoy that little shop. Sad to say, it changed hands some years back, and although it remained open for a while, I think the downgrading and eventual closure of the nearby Reckitts factory probably removed much of its profitability. The shop has been discontinued and the doorway blocked up. There is little trace of Elliot's shop now, just a blank wall of a house with its back turned to the passing traffic.

Interestingly, they are building apartments all along the roadway north of where the shop once was. I reckon it would make some money as a small grocery again if it was ever re-opened. There'd be no Mrs Elliot, though. She must have gone to her reward a long time ago.

Chicken Little and the Red-Wrapped Cherry Liqueur Incident

I got over the fright of people's unexpected limbs appearing in front of me bearing miscellaneous objects about a month after I went from sole-trader to just one office pleb in a crowd. So it was no bother today when a hand materialised in front of my eyes and waved a cherry liqueur chocolate wrapped in festive red paper in front of my nose while I was speaking with a customer about the quality of service she was getting from the local government. I just nodded my thanks in mid prattle and the sweety was placed gently on the desktop beside my computer keyboard.

One thing that has to be said about my workplace: no-one is stingy with the sweets. There is often a coming or going party for people happening in some corner, with oddments of treats from biscuits to whole cream cakes going a begging, and everything sugary in between.

Whether someone travels to the far side of the world or the opposite side of the road, they always remember to bring a bag of lollies or something for us to munch upon. So Valentine's Day was a perfect excuse for confectionary. It was from someone's thoughtful gift for the day that was in it that this particular sweety had emerged, and true to form the recipient decided to share the wealth.

When I'd finished my phone conversation with my customer and put the information he'd asked for into the external post basket, I sat back at the desk and eyed the sweety. It certainly looked like a nice one. The paper was that plasticy type in which rich chocolates are sometimes wrapped. There was no-one on the line for the moment, so I thought I'd take my chance and gobble it down.

The first bite let the thick, rich cherry liquer inside mix around luciously. "Not bad," I thought, although the dark chololate was a little bitter. There was a small piece of cherry in there somewhere too, which was a nice touch. As I swallowed the last bit down the phone rang.

The conversation went a little like this:

Willie: "Hello. Such-and-such Department. Can I help you?"
Caller: "Yes, please. I received a letter from you about my service? Can you help me?"
Willie: "Caawk! Awk, Gaack, HAAAH..AWK!
Caller: "Pardon...?"

The last feckin' swallow of chocolate had gone halfway down my windpipe and was bubbling about the top of my larnyx while I went blue in the face and made noises like a demented chicken.

Caller: "Hello...? Are you there?"

There came the sounds of someone shaking their telephone handset in puzzlement.

Willie (huskily and with tears flowing down his cheeks): "I'm sorry.... I'm having a bit of a problem here... HAAAH...AWK..!!"

Caller: "Bloody mobile phones! The reception is shite!"

Willie: "Gaa-ck..! HAAA-AWK!!"

I swear. No more liqueurs. My body just can't be trusted.