{"id":4307,"date":"2026-04-19T12:56:39","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T11:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/?p=4307"},"modified":"2026-05-07T10:49:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T09:49:27","slug":"cake-making-and-sharing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/cake-making-and-sharing\/","title":{"rendered":"Task 11 – Cake making and sharing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Profound thought for the Task<\/strong><\/em>
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
\u2013 Eckhart Tolle<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The task:<\/em><\/strong> Make a cake and visit \/ invite a friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> a cake, which doesn’t necessarily imply bake, but it does imply a degree of planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 – Eierlik\u00f6rtorte <\/em>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 <\/em>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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> and make similar failures along the way). Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Profound thought for the TaskAll 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\u2013 Eckhart Tolle The task: Make a cake and visit \/ invite a friend. I took this to be one task, rather than two consisting of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eggbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4307"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4339,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4307\/revisions\/4339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splunge.co.uk\/richnilk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}