Profound thought for the Task
All great artists create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind
– Eckhart Tolle
The task: Make a cake and visit / invite a friend.
I took this to be one task, rather than two consisting of 1: Baking a cake and 2: visiting/inviting a friend. Clearly the thought behind it was to make a cake, and then inflict the cake onto a friend I was to invite or visit.
Being a Cook by name, unfortunately means that I’m no cook by nature, and although I’m not sure that baking is actually cooking, it does seem to involve a lot of the same type of paraphernalia (e.g. recipes/ingredients/weighing/chopping/mixing/oven-related stuff etc). Which is why I’ve tended to avoid making cakes in the past, and even when I did it would likely be a simple sponge and I would require assistants, and assistance. No matter, the task was to make a cake, which doesn’t necessarily imply bake, but it does imply a degree of planning.
Straightaway I decided I would like to make a cake to my tastes. I’d like to make a cake that is not one you see everyday (e.g. carrot cake, victoria sponge, chocolate cake, coffee & walnut, lemon drizzle etc etc), but was still likely to be delicious and easy to make. Now my mother-in-law makes my favourite cake of all time, and this is a german recipe which involves wizardry I don’t really understand – Eierlikörtorte is a no-bake cake made with a lovely mix of nuts, dark chocolate, & whipped cream. The special trick with her cake is that this lot is really just a base to hold a flood of Advocaat (egg-nog), which is poured over the top. Delicious & alcoholic!
There are a lot of lovely cakes in Germany, and they don’t have to be alcoholic. They do seem to use a lot of cream (or Quark if it’s a quantum cake), and I like that idea because cakes have to be delicious and potentially the last thing you will eat before having a heart attack. Who wants some sort of sugar-invoked aneurysm after eating just a couple of oatcakes?
So I had a quick hunt through the cake-web, which is like the dark-web but instead of selling drugs and guns it gives you access to thousands of cake recipes which really should be banned. One of my favourite cakes is carrot cake. I like the moistness of the sponge, the subtle cinnamony taste and the creamy topping. I’m especially amazed that you can make a tasty cake like that with a vegetable. A carrot! Unlikely don’t you think? But according to the cake-web you can make cakes with all sorts of unlikely ingredients (including drugs, ironically, but not guns I don’t think). I wasted a couple of minutes looking through a few cake options, and four hours later I found just the cake I wanted to makebake. A Courgette and Walnut cake (on the site it was called a Zucchini & Walnut Cake but… … well we know don’t we).
The recipe for the Courgette & Walnut cake was in a language called Australian, and so as well as the faux-pas of misnaming a common vegetable, it also resolutely stuck to the old-fashioned measurements called cups. Hmmm. I mean how can any modern civilisation hope to drag itself into 21st Century when it’s system of weights and measures includes something like a cup. What sort of cup? How thick, how tall, how wide, how heavy? I’ve got thirty cups in my kitchen and not one of them is the same as the other. I think it’s ridiculous, but then again, the non-British Europeans probably thought it was ridiculous when the British once used pounds & ounces. (and miles and yards, and feet and inches etc etc).
Anyway back to my cake. I needed 3/4 of a cup of this, and 1-and-a-half cups of that. Interestingly I needed two-and-a-half cups of courgettes, which I’m sure was a mistake in the recipe. Sticking courgettes into my tea cups wasn’t going to help, I thought. Maybe they meant 2 and a half courgettes that would make more sense. But no, it turns out that every single Cook’s ingredient has its own individual cup-equivalent measure, which then needs converting into grams for normal people to use. A courgette cup (124g) is not the same as a flour cup (125g), or a sugar cup (201g) or a carrot cup(122g) or a butter cup (227g) etc etc. Of course is isn’t! It could go a long way to explaining the anomalies of various Australian, and American cuisine I’ve tasted over the years.
For my cake to be a success, I first needed to navigate through this cup minefield and come up with a list of ingredients with relatable measurements against them. Once that was done, the process of producing a successful cake was much more straightforward.
To cut a long cake story short, would be to start reading from here. The basic recipe-following make-and-bake process all went remarkably smoothly, and within a couple of hours I had two reasonable looking cake halves ready to be swamped with something creamy. I chose a marscapone and double-cream mix, which deviated from the ‘frosting’ suggested in the recipe. That’s just how deviant I can be. It turned out to be genius, although very likely will reduce my life expectancy by a few years. No matter – this cake will make you want to give-up smoking,drinking,dangerous sports, and asbestos related hobbies all in one go – which should counter any minor cardiovascular issues that might crop up.
No more to be said, I leave you with this photo of the cake that was baked on this day. It will never be repeated, and the recipe will die with me, (unless you go here and make similar failures along the way). Enjoy!
Oh yes! And the second part of the task, which was to share the cake with someone. First I shared a slice or two with my housemate who made appropriate ummm-ing noises when she ate it. I took this to mean she liked it. Secondly, I took half the cake to a friend who is no stranger to cake making himself. He also made all the right noises, and (being a chef) has a lot of experience in saying the right things when sampling other people’s cooking.
It’s a day later now, and I’m delighted to say that both of these people are still alive.
All great cake-makers create from a place of no-mind, from inner ingredients. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the cake.
