Cake for Mothering Sunday

Hiccup:           Should I know you?

Valka:             No – you were only a babe – but a mother never forgets.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

I expect the fact hasn’t escaped your notice that tomorrow is Mothering Sunday.¹ Mums are brilliant for all sorts of reasons to which I could never do anything resembling justice in what will be a rather hastily-written post; even aside from the whole carrying-one’s-developing-form-within-the-womb-for-nine-months business, there are surely few people who impact our lives more intensely. They teach us all sorts of things; mine taught me, among myriad other things, to do maths, read music, sew, play countless word games, fold clothes, draw feet from the front rather than the side, find Warp Zone on the original Super Mario game,² and fix almost anything with such bits and bobs as masking tape, glue, spare wood, and a G-clamp. She also taught me, with the help of an ancient little Be-Ro recipe book,³ to bake cakes, an extremely valuable piece of knowledge which I have embellished and adapted into the form in which I shall now impart it to you, O Filially Devoted Reader, in case you should wish to offer delicious cake to your own excellent mother as part of tomorrow’s celebrations. Or, you know, if you’d just like to make some cake.

 

Mmm ... cake.

The basics:

100g each of self-raising flour, sugar (caster if you can get it; granulated works in a pinch), and butter (or alternative – I personally favour something called Trex⁴), plus one egg and a splash of milk, will make one average-sized cake. Multiply up or down as you need; the numbers aren’t exactly difficult. You will also need some form of baking tin, and, of course, an oven.

1)     Preheat the oven – about 150ºC should be about right.

2)     Put the butter and sugar in a big bowl and mix them together with a fork until they reach a consistent, creamy texture.

3)     Break the egg(s) into another receptacle – my mum and I always used to use a glass mug – add a splash of milk, and stir vigorously with another fork, again until the mixture is consistent.

4)     Alternately add small amounts – about a third or quarter of the total should be about right – of flour and of egg-and-milk to the butter-and-sugar, stirring with a spoon after each addition until the mixture is consistent (are you spotting a theme here?).

5)     Line your baking tin(s) with baking paper. If you haven’t got any baking paper, liberally slather butter all over the inside and hope for the best. If you want a sandwich cake with something in the middle, you can either bake each half in a separate tin, or carefully cut the cake in half afterwards (I’d recommend the former if possible). If you’re making little individual cupcakes, you’ll need cupcake cases; a special cupcake baking tray to put them in is ideal, but I find that if you space them out well on a normal baking tray they tend turn out all right.

6)     Transfer the cake mix to the lined baking tin(s) and pop it in the oven. I always find that the correct length of time to leave it in there is a bit of a guessing game, and it depends on the size of the cake; basically, watch like a hawk and, once it starts to smell yummy, test it by sticking a knife down through the middle. If the knife comes out clean, your cake is done.

Variations on the theme:

For a chocolate cake, add a tablespoon or two (sneak a taste to decide how much) of cocoa to your cake mix. If you haven’t got cocoa but have got hot chocolate powder (which would always be the scenario when my mum and I made chocolate cake), use half as much sugar, replace the missing sugar with hot chocolate powder, and then add a bit more hot chocolate powder. (You can really tell how an exact a science this all this.)

Honey and marmalade cakes work along a similar principle: halve the sugar, replace the missing sugar with honey – clear, rather than set, works best – or marmalade, then add the same amount of honey or marmalade again.

If you’re feeling especially creative, try a marble cake: divide your cake mix in half and add cocoa to one half, then pour both into your cake tin and mix them extremely slightly and gently with a spoon.

Icing:

The trick with icing is that you always need more icing sugar, relative to whatever ingredient you’re using to stick it together, than you think. The best policy is to add the said other ingredient little by little – as soon as there’s no powder left, you’re good to go. As to what that other ingredient is, water works fine, but lemon juice makes a much tastier icing. Other kinds of juice work too; I’ve successfully used apple and orange in the past. If you want butter icing, use as your other ingredient – here’s a surprise – butter. To make butter icing chocolatey, add a little cocoa (don’t try that with water- or juice-based icing though).

Icing is really difficult to spread; your best bet is the back of a teaspoon. (Do wait for the cake to cool first, or the icing will melt all down the sides.) Alternatively, to avoid the trauma of potentially contaminating a beautiful icing with cake crumbs, you can just dust a little icing sugar over the top of the cake.

Of course, if you have a snazzy spreading knife like the one above, do feel free to use that.

A couple of specific cakes I like to make:

1)     Butterfly cakes. Bake cupcakes and, once they’re cooled, scoop a chunk out of the top of each with a knife or a teaspoon and cut said chunk in half. Fill the resulting hole with jam and butter icing, then stick the halves of the chunk you scooped out into this filling, at angles so they look like wings.

2)     Mickey Mouse Oreo cupcakes. Halve some Oreos⁵ and put them in the bottoms of some cupcake cases, then dollop chocolate cake mix on top. Once baked, ice liberally with chocolate butter icing and stick two more Oreo halves into it, upright, so that they look like Mickey Mouse ears.

And there you go. I am well aware that there will likely be individuals reading this post who can bake and impart knowledge of baking far better than I can, or possibly who profoundly disagree with me on any number of technical matters, but hopefully some of the above may have been slightly useful to some of you – and I wish you a very happy Mothering Sunday.⁶

                                         

Footnotes

¹ That’s Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, rather than Mother’s Day, which is celebrated in the United States, Australia, and some other places on 13^th May – which happens, incidentally, to be my mum’s birthday. Funny how these things work out, huh?

² At the end of Level 2, instead of going into the green pipe at the end of the underground section, jump up onto the line of brick at the top of the screen and walk along it for a while. You’ll reach another three pipes that allow you to skip to later levels. (We were genuinely so excited when my mum figured this out. Her extreme thoroughness in playing video games frequently pays off.)

³ Well, ours was ancient: a 41^st edition is available that was published in 2011: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005XZYDJ6/?tag=ecosia07-21.

⁴ Seriously, that stuff is brilliant: no animal products, no hydrogenated fats, less sat fat than butter, you can use it straight from the fridge and use 20% less of it than you would butter: http://familybaking.co.uk/about-trex.

⁵ Fancy watching the best Oreo advert ever, featuring the musical delights of Owl City? Of course you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFsZ6BO4LU0.

⁶ That said, the following article provides some serious food for thought on the way we tend to do Mothering Sunday in Christian circles: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/mothering.sunday.not.a.happy.day.for.everyone.so.tread.carefully/81197.htm. There is absolutely more to motherhood than biology, and more to godly womanhood than motherhood, though these are issues I’m still personally trying to disentangle in my understanding.