Thank your Maker
We start making things for our mothers long before we should be let
loose on the concept of making anything. We embraced the tradition of mother’s
day. At school we’d make gifts from macaroni pieces and pipecleaners. We’d
craft terrible drawings with our non-toxic, obnoxiously coloured felt-tip pens
and bits of glitter. In fits of rebellion, we’d make her clay ashtrays. My
mother didn’t smoke, but when I made her angry, I’d often
picture her with a pipe in her mouth, what with all her comments about smoke
coming from her ears and all of that. I think my proudest moment was making
something in the kitchen. I melted ice cream and stirred a disgusting amount of
milo through it and called my creation the Mil-ice-o.
I then poured it into a container, wrapped it, and left it for about five days
before proudly presenting it to my lovely mum. When you are seven,
refrigeration is highly overrated.
Then in pimply teenage angst, we’d write good ole mum letters,
around the time she’d found our diary, or grounded us, which would run along
the lines of:
Dear General,
Thank you for your continued enforced captivity over the
years. It has been an invaluable learning experience for me and I hope to
use all that you have taught me about self-discipline, self-motivation and
self-medication to succeed in the future. Now can I please go to the party? If
I don’t go, I might die. Seriously. Everyone else is going and I will be
ridiculed – I’m the only person
on the planet not going. My life is over and it’s all your fault. You ruin
everything. Including my school uniform. It’s dirty and needs washing.
Your captive,
Corporal X5743E
PS. My skirt is not too short. It's perfectly acceptable and it will not give people the wrong idea.
Every year since, we have all struggled mightily with
present-buying. Flowers can be a little messy. Sweets? It's not always safe to
give her energy-enhancing foods. And an awful lot of other things – in fact, at
last check, all of them – are, according to maternal lore, A Waste Of Money. But perhaps it’s true, those things are a waste
of money and the best present we can give our mums, other than a Mil-ice-o (don’t knock it, it’s genius)
is a big fat thanks.
So this year my gift to my mum is a few wee facts in print. Which
are: you are singlehandedly the best person at making whites whiter than white
(how mum, how?) You are the solver of all my problems; you annihilate my demons
and know how to get rid of weeds from my herb garden and other weird helpful
things that only mums seem to know. If I didn’t have you, I think my perilous state
of being would fling wildly between emotional Hiroshima and feral beast. Happy
Mothers Day mum, and thanks for everything. Especially the tips for todays post.
This is one of my mum's favourite cakes - super simple and delicious spiced Apple Tea Cake
 |
| Photo by Armelle Habib |
Ingredients
2 granny smith
apples, peeled, cored and diced
220 g (7 3/4 oz/1
cup) caster (superfine) sugar
125 g (4 1/2 oz)
butter, softened
1 large egg
170 g (6 oz/1 cup)
sticky raisins
225 g (8 oz/1 1/2
cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
1 tsp bicarbonate
of soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground
cinnamon
1 tsp freshly
grated nutmeg
1 tsp mixed spice
60 g (2 1/4 oz/1/2
cup) chopped walnuts
To serve
icing sugar,
sifted, for dusting or mascarpone
Method
Preheat the oven to
180°C (350°F/Gas 4). Grease a 22 cm (8 1/2 inch) ring cake tin and line with
baking paper.
Mix the apple with
the sugar in a bowl and let stand for 3 minutes.
Combine the butter
and egg in a bowl and beat until light and fluffy. Fold in the apple mixture
and the raisins and set aside. In another bowl, sift together the dry
ingredients and add to the apple mixture, stirring sparingly. Fold in half the
walnuts, pour into the prepared tin and sprinkle on the remaining walnuts. Bake for 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake
comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in the tin before turning out onto a wire
rack to cool completely.
Serve with a
dusting of icing sugar and/or a dollop of mascarpone.
No comments:
Post a Comment