Don't sweat the sweet stuff

People seem to have one of two reactions to baking.  Either they freak out, get flour everywhere, drop eggs on the floor, keep opening the oven to check to see whether the cake is rising and then burst into tears when it doesn't; or they come over all evangelical and try to tell you that baking is better than sex.

If you are either one of these types, you're doing something wrong.

I can't advise you if you are the second type, as I am not that good a baker (mercifully), but if you are the first type, dear reader, I have just one word for you: chillax.  Honestly, it'll be fine.

Baking is one of my favourite things to do.  I find it relaxing, soothing and rewarding, from settling down with a cup of tea and a cookbook to decide what to make (a permanent favourite of mine is How to Be a Domestic Goddess, signed by both my aunt and the Goddess herself), to licking the bowl once the cakey thing is in the oven.  I'm not going to be all smug and say that everything goes perfectly every time - I regularly curdle cake mixture when I put the eggs in, but to be honest, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference - and if I'm in a bad mood, horrendous things happen.  Seriously, if you're feeling grumpy or rushed, don't even bother.  You'll just end up resenting the cake, the cake will get offended, sulk and just not rise.  I had to make a birthday cake once, not out of choice, but out of 'oh, Jinni, you've got loads of essays to do, but I can't bake and X is out tonight, so can you just whip something up for Y's birthday tomorrow?'.  Note the lack of 'please' or 'thank you'.  So I made this chocolate monstrosity that just sat in the cake tin, didn't do anything and tasted of sludge.

However, if I am baking out of desire rather than duty, then the cake looks and tastes a hell of a lot nicer.  Just look at these blueberry muffins:

Don't they look pretty?  I made these for a super cool road trip to Derbyshire, to do some impro at the Methodists annual conference - rock and freakin' roll - and they seemed to go down pretty well with my three fellow road trippers.  (Yep, that's three muffins each.  No point in being stingy.)

A few months later, I took a train to Cornwall, again to do some impro, and I thought that I would make some biccies for the journey.  There were ten of us this time, which meant there would have to be quite a lot of said biccies, so I enlisted some help in the form of my friends Nicky, Maria and Rhiannon.  Now, I like making biscuit dough, I don't mind cutting it out, but I find decorating them rather tedious.  I end up doing things like this:

This is all very well and good, but very fiddly and requires a level of detail that I just cannot sustain for fifty biscuits.  Luckily, the others were a lot keener on the decorating than I was and produced such gems as these:

Sorry, it's upside down and I have no idea how to reverse it, but if you care to crane your neck, you will notice that the giraffe has been modified into a unicorn, the boxing kangaroo has a black eye and the dragon has been shot.  Now, that's proper decorating.

I quite like baking just for the sake of it though, without a special occasion in mind.  I made these a little while ago, partly because I felt sorry for an open bag of dessiccated coconut in the cupboard that was just sitting there, feeling sorry for itself:

Ta-da!  Raspberry and coconut muffin cake thingummies.  No reason, just there.  Feed on, flatmates.

I am also something of a loser, which is why I decided that baking two Madeira cakes from two different recipes and doing a taste test was a really cool way to spend a weekend.  The first was a James Martin recipe, which was fine, but the crust tasted quite dry.  The second, which was also the winner, was a Nigella recipe, which avoids having a dry crust by sprinkling the cake mixture with demerara sugar before you put it in the oven, so it goes all nice and crunchy:

It looks a bit rubbish there, but I can assure that it wasn't, it was brilliant.  I served it with a side of modesty.

Right, it's nearly time for dinner, so I will leave you with just one last thing, a photo of a product that I really want to find a recipe for, just so I can buy it:

Snigger.

Triumph!

If I was a normal sort of person, I would start this blog with the photos I have taken of food that I have made or eaten in the last couple of days and go from there, a diary starting with the day that you start writing sort of approach.

Not being a normal sort of person, however, and liking things neat and tidy (although you would never believe that if you saw the state of my room sometimes) I would like to tie up loose ends and start from the very beginning, from the very first photo that I took of some food that I made.  And here it is:

This is a very blurry photo of some linguine alle vongole, or linguine with clams if you're not being pretentious. I took it because I was feeling triumphant - this was one of the few meals that I have ever made without using a recipe book.  (Don't get used to that as a theme though, this hardly ever happens.  I freakin' love cookery books.)  I had just been to my local farmers' market and had bought a handful of clams on a whim from the lovely fishmonger there, who told me how to cook them in this way.  Unfortunately, I didn't write it down and I think I took this photo in February - something to do with steaming them in some white wine and garlic and then tossing them with drained, cooked pasta, and chucking over some olive oil and chopped parsley.  Hey, I DO remember it!  

This next photo is another triumphant, no-recipe moment:

This is definitely a morning-after-the-night-before type of brunch, although I was obviously not feeling too dreadful if I managed to whip this up.  Just pretty damn hungry by the looks of things.  Jesus, I've even put it on ciabatta for heavens' sake.  Yep, definitely wasn't hungover.  I think the stuff on the left is a mixture of mushrooms, tomatoes and rosemary and I've put some parsley all over the top again.  Who says you can't garnish when you're cooking for one?!

Just one last picture I think (after all, I don't want you getting bored, dear reader), still illustrating the theme of triumph:

JAM!  Yeah baby, I made jam!  From scratch, no sugar thermometer, it actually set to a good consistency instead of being fruit soup or fruit cement - jam!  You blatantly can't read the label, so I will tell you that it is rhubarb and ginger.  I did make it from a recipe, but I was inspired to make it by my grandmother talking about the jam that her aunt made when she was little - my grandmother being little, not the aunt.  Although maybe she was little, I don't know, I wasn't there.  Anyway, the recipe was for just plain rhubarb jam, but I added chopped stem ginger and some of the syrup from the jar as well.  It wasn't super gingery, but it had a nice warmth to it and it is definitely a recipe that I will be repeating when rhubarb is next in season.  And yes, I did give a jar to my grandmother.

My first confession

My name is Jinni and I have a confession.  I've been watching porn.

Food porn, that is, in the delectably inspiring form of Nigella's Kitchen on iplayer.
This is probably a bit full-on, a bit too much information for my first ever blog post, but I feel that if I am going to do this, I may as well do it properly and be completely honest with you, dear reader.  I am not going to say that I am a foodie, a foodaholic, completely obsessed with food and all those other platitudes that get bandied around, but I do really rather like the stuff.  I do think about it rather a lot, I do have rather too many cookbooks for someone of my tender years and tenderer budget and I do believe that food is the basis of every good social gathering.  That may be a girlie tea, a post-apocalyptic night out fry-up or a romantic meal where you don't even notice the food...all of these things are utter bliss to me.
However, please do not think that I believe that the only way to eat and enjoy good food is in company, good heavens, no.  Most of the time, I cook just for me and I take just as much pleasure in doing that as I do cooking for other people.  I have been getting very over-excited of late and taking pictures of the things that I have created, which has prompted me to start this blog.  What's the point of the pictures if I don't do anything with them?  They will just languish, lonely and unloved, on Facebook or my USB drive thingy, like all those photos in a box that I keep meaning to put into albums and frames.
So, dear reader, if you care to follow me into the next post, please do.  Just so long as I can work out how to upload photos...