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.

Life and the Hobbit-esque Slog

“Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

An absolutely beautiful wallpaper based on the original Hobbit cover art by RossSchmidt on DeviantArt: http://rossschmidt.deviantart.com/art/The-Hobbit-wallpaper-404247712

This evening, a housemate and I have plans to sprawl on the sofa in front of the second half of the extended edition of The Two Towers, while working our way through the second half of a packet of chilli Doritos. An excellent plan for anyone’s evening, I think, but especially for the said housemate and myself, because neither of us had watched the whole of the Lord of the Rings trilogy before embarking on our current run-through of it together.

You may indeed gasp in horror at this statement, O Appalled Reader; that would be the response I would expect based on experience, followed by something along the lines of, ‘How have you not seen it?’ or, ‘You have to see it!’ It always feels slightly as if my status as not having seen these films casts aspersions on my very membership of civilised human society; wounded, I tend to lamely attempt to make some level of amends by countering that I really like The Hobbit.

And I do really like The Hobbit. (We read it in our English lessons during the summer term of Year 7; in fact, sessions with that particular teacher consisted entirely of reading The Hobbit, writing our own adventure stories, and, in one memorable instance right at the end of term, eating ice cream, and I tend to feel that English lessons rarely get better than that.) Among the many highlights of the novel are included the trolls’ argument over how best to cook Bilbo and his dwarven companions; the escape from the Elvenking’s halls in floating barrels; and, of course, the famous riddle competition between Bilbo and Gollum. Why on Earth this last scene was abridged in the film version, when so much else that wasn’t even mentioned in passing in the (actually rather short) book was shoved in to eke out the plotline enough to charge viewers for three cinema tickets, is entirely beyond me.¹ In fact, as a result of all this cutting out scenes that were in the book in order to make space for elaborate subplots that weren’t, the Hobbit film trilogy ended up, in my opinion, being an altogether rather different animal to the book. The films seem to have been designed to be grand and epic and impressive;² that is not at all what the book is like. The book is full of people squabbling over niceties and making daft decisions and trudging along exhaustedly and wishing there was more to eat. For the high fantasy story it is, it is stunningly, in that sense, realistic.³

And that’s actually one of the reasons it’s such a favourite of mine. All this adventuring is all very well, but it’s pretty well guaranteed that if one were to give in to the Tookish side of oneself and set off on an adventure with a bunch of dwarves one barely knew, one would find oneself squabbling over niceties and making daft decisions and trudging along exhaustedly and wishing there was more to eat on not infrequent occasions. And yes, adventures include intense battles and daring escapes and the occasional encounter with a dragon, but they also include, necessarily, a whole lot of walking about in between them. In the following passage from Chapter 8, ‘Flies and Spiders’, the party are working their way through the gloomy forest of Mirkwood, and Bombur has just woken up from an enchanted sleep on account of which the others had been forced to carry him for some time:

[Bombur] woke up suddenly and sat up scratching his head. He could not make out where he was at all, nor why he felt so hungry; for he had forgotten everything that had happened since they started their journey that May morning long ago. The last thing that he remembered was the party at the hobbit’s house, and they had great difficulty in making him believe their tale of all the many adventures they had had since.

When he heard that there was nothing to eat, he sat down and wept, for he felt very weak and wobbly in the legs. “Why ever did I wake up!” he cried. “I was having such beautiful dreams. I dreamed I was walking in a forest rather like this one, only lit with torches on the trees and lamps swinging from the branches and fires burning on the ground; and there was a great feast going on, going on for ever. A woodland king was there with a crown of leaves, and there was a merry singing, and I could not count or describe the things there were to eat and drink.”

“You need not try,” said Thorin. “In fact if you can’t talk about something else, you had better be silent. We are quite annoyed enough with you as it is. If you hadn’t waked up, we should have left you to your idiotic dreams in the forest; you are no joke to carry even after weeks of short commons.”

There was nothing now to be done but to tighten the belts round their empty stomachs, and hoist their empty sacks and packs, and trudge along the track without any great hope of ever getting to the end before they lay down and died of starvation. This they did all that day, going very slowly and wearily, while Bombur kept on wailing that his legs would not carry him and that he wanted to lie down and sleep.

Sleeping is, of course, excellent, but a forest floor is not exactly the best place to do it. (Especially if that forest is Mirkwood.)

And sometimes life is like that. And my point is not really that life is hard, although certainly it can be. My point is that life is often dull and plodding and disappointing and irritating, and the issue is not so much that dreadful hardship is fortuitously thrust upon us, as that we find ourselves midway through fulfilling commitments that demand of us effort they barely seem worth. And, when it comes to following Jesus in the midst of that wearying slog, I can often be like Bombur in my despair at the discrepancy between where I currently am and where I wish I was. Spiritually healthy as it is to long for that real and promised never-ending feast under the greatest King of all,⁴ such longing can all too easily end up robbing me of the motivation to actually do anything where I am. My depressingly lengthy to-do list seems to have nothing to do with the glory of the coming age, and I am painfully aware that I am capable of no deed, word, or thought that adequately reflects that glory.⁵ My legs will not carry me; I want to lie down and sleep.

Happily, it was never my legs that were carrying me in the first place.

Not that I have already obtained [the resurrection from the dead] or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, have this attitude; and if in anything you have a different attitude, God will reveal that also to you; however, let us keep living by that same standard to which we have attained…

…our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.

That’s from the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. (I’ve quoted from the New American Standard translation rather than my usual anglicised English Standard Version, because I think it expresses the idea more faithfully.)⁶ Note how Paul’s logic sits in exact contradiction to that I outlined in the previous paragraph. According to him, we press on in our inevitable imperfection not in spite of the knowledge that we are awaiting the return of our Saviour to perfect us, but because of it. Longing for perfection should not make me want, like Bombur, to stop putting one foot in front of the other and retreat into dreams; it should renew my commitment to keep plodding onwards, to press harder, to live by that same standard to which I have attained. Why? Because that’s what Jesus took hold of me for. The discrepancy between where I am now and where I wish I was should prompt me to reach more determinedly across the gap, even though I know I’ll never actually cross it in this lifetime, because that very reaching is a key component of what God intends for me, as much as my being ultimately brought into full perfection is.

Which all sounds very nice, of course. It’s a lot harder to actually apply it during the Hobbit-esque slog, when tasks are tiring and people are irritating and the necessary obligation in front of me seems very far removed from the metaphorical Lonely Mountain and Arkenstone and end-goal of the quest. But then, if it weren’t hard, there’d be no need for pressing on; I’d meander a couple of steps and already be there.

So what does this pressing on actually look like, in the translating of prose and writing of essays, the doing of laundry and food shopping, the following of the same dull route up to campus? Well, that would take another post to explore, for one thing, and for another, I’m still very much in the process of figuring it out. But striving to figure out how to actively follow Jesus in the everyday slog is surely a part of striving to actively follow him, and I’m learning. Thankfulness is one good thing to work on. Not grumbling is another. Taking pains to show respect and concern for others is too – am I being kind to my housemates and lecturers and the lady at the checkout and the incredibly slow walkers taking up the whole pavement in front of me?⁷

Following Jesus is an adventure, and as such, there tends to be a lot of walking in between the ostentatiously exciting bits – but when we consider that the very act of pressing on is part of God’s glorious plan for us, even the depressingly lengthy to-do list in front of us surely becomes at least a little bit exciting.

Footnotes

¹ For some purchasable-on-a-T-shirt hilarity on the subject of three films having been squeezed out of The Hobbit, reparrish on Redbubble is most excellent: http://www.redbubble.com/people/reparrish/works/13058873-writer-fights-tolkien-vs-lewis.

² Mind you, a Tobscus Literal Trailer is surely capable of de-epicising anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86bznYoj9e0.

³ If you would like to assess the correctness of this statement by reading or re-reading the novel for yourself, you are fortunate in that copyright expiry laws mean the whole thing is available free online – here, for instance: http://www.goodreads.com/reader/27325-the-hobbit?percent=24.028013.

⁴ Indeed, Romans 8 speaks of all creation, along with us, groaning as in childbirth until it should be liberated from decay and brought into glory: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+8&version=ESVUK.

⁵ The end of Romans 7 is useful on this: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%207&version=ESVUK. “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.”  

⁶ Do have a peruse of the whole chapter. It’s such a good one, and Bible Gateway will gladly provide it for you in whichever version you like: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil+3&version=NASB.

⁷ It seems to me that people often quote Colossians 3:17 on the subject of living for Jesus in the everyday: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” But when you get some context on that, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=col+3&version=ESVUK, it comes at the end of a whole list of characteristics to be displaying. We are not simply told to do everything in Jesus’ name; we are also told what sort of thing that is going to consist of.