Competitive Baking Part 1

 

When we did our major kitchen refurb a couple of years ago we got two ovens. One was a combined oven and microwave and was 'his' for cooking. The other was a fancy one for baking. And that was mine.

 

I've always hated cooking, which I look upon as an infringement on my time. I  resent for example having to hover in the kitchen sticking a fork into a pan of potatoes every 5 minutes to check if they're  done yet, when I could  be in the living room reading a book.   For me cooking is like most other forms of housework; dull and endlessly repetitive. Nor am I all that interested in the end product. Left to myself I'd live on bread and cheese.

 

 Happily for me, OH made an error of gigantic proportions not long before we tied the knot, by telling someone, in my presence, that he was  'a much better cook than Anne' . Not surprisingly perhaps, he's done the cooking ever since.

 

 

Baking though is a different thing. I like baking and I'm quite good at it. In the past I've tended to stick to what I know, but I'd recently resloved to expand my repertoire and was doing OK until the Great Ankle Snap. But now that I'm immobile the path to the baking oven is open and undefended, and  OH has taken full advantage of. As you can see....

 

 

 

 

Top - Lemon Cake

 

Bottom - Raspberry Mousse Cake

 

It has to be said that the lemon one, being batter based, tasted a bit like a pancake, but annoyingly I couldn't fault the raspberry one. I don't like him baking because he never uses a recipe which irritates me, especially when the results are good. Sometimes I can be a bit of an ungrateful cow....

 

The roses in the bottom picture came from my friend J, she of the cat-who-needed-to-be-fed, and they're lovely. The raspberries in the cake came from our garden, a trivial matter to most people but not to me. When we first moved to Orkney we joined the local gardening club, and I happened to mention that we were planning to grow raspberries. Huge intake of breath from several present, all of whom sagely opined that 'we would never grow raspberries in Burray'.

 

I damn well will I thought as we came away. And we did.