How I made a nana cake and almost burned down the house…

So this is it.

The infamous cake that caused me to set my kitchen on fire.

It is – by the way – the very same infamous cake I had promised to tell you about before but never got around to do so, because when I tried to make it the first time everything just went horribly wrong (and yet the cake had been eaten before I was able to take a picture – because if I had taken a pic, I still would have been able to tell you about the disaster at least.)

Anyway, disaster is the key word when speaking of this cake.

I have strictly followed the recipe, though.

The recipe is from my nana’s favourite cook book, one of her most treasured posessions (not the nana with the hand-written recipes, this time it’s the other one who passed away when I was very little, but I still remember her delicious cakes!)

I mixed 250 g butter, 250 g sugar, 1 sachet vanilla sugar/a few drops of vanilla essence, 2 eggs, 4 egg yolks and 2 tablespoons rum.

I added 150 g plain flour, 100 g corn flour and 3 teaspoons baking powder.

I beat 4 egg whites until stiff and folded them in.

When I had all of this done, there was no fire in sight.

Everything was fine, so I continued.

I greased a loaf pan and lined it with greased baking parchment (again – everything according to the instructions in the recipe book).

I put two tablespoons of the dough into the pan, put it in the oven and turned on the grill.

According to the recipe, you’re supposed to bake the cake under the grill for about two minutes, then spread over another layer of dough, bake it again for another two minutes and so on until all the dough is gone.

So after two minutes, I took the cake out of the oven and although the baking parchment was slightly darker than usual, the cake looked fine:

So I put two more spoons of dough into the pan, put everything back into the oven – and at some stage between that moment and 120 seconds later, the baking parchment must have caught fire, because when I opened the oven two minutes later, my cake was ablaze.

Although my cake was on fire, I was one lucky girl for two reasons:

a) After the baking parchment was burned down and all was left was ashes, the fire burned out so that I could grab the pan, throw it into the sink and distinguish each and every possible remaining trouble spot with water.

b) The cake caught fire at the beginning. This means, I had a lot of dough left over, so I quickly greased another loaf pan and continued making my cake.

Except, this time, I didn’t act according to the recipe.

I just didn’t want to use baking parchment again.

I cut the cake in smaller pieces and covered them with chocolate icing. Also according to recipe, by the way.

Ironically, the first thing that came to my mind was “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen – and then I spent the whole day thinking of other songs relating to fire in one way or another… 

“The Fire Inside” by Bon Jovi

“Light My Fire” by The Doors

“Smoke On The Water” by Deep Purple

“Fight Fire With Fire” by Kansas

“Wheel In The Sky” by Journey

“Ring Of Fire” by Johnny Cash

“We Didn’t Start The Fire” by Billy Joel

“London’s Burning” by The Clash 

“Hearts On Fire” by Bryan Adams

Vintage Baking

Ah, my life would be so boring, if my Mum didn’t look after me and gave me things to do…

This week, for instance, she assigned me a “voluntary extra task” (her words, not mine): bringing order into Grandma’s collection of recipes.

My birthday is coming up next week and so I asked Nana if she could possible make her signature chocolate cake (especially because she is the only one in the family who has the recipe otherwise I would have made it myself).

Now, Nana is not the youngest anymore and couldn’t quite remember which chocolate cake I meant… so we had to go through all her recipes.

And you can imagine that a woman at the age of 70-something has quite a collection…

To cut a long story short: Mum came to the conclusion that someone (aka her daughter aka myself) had to put some sort of order into all these recipes.

That was after we had come across “Lotte’s savarin” six times and “Aloisia’s cough syrup” (no kidding, those recipes really exist in Nana’s collection) five times – before even coming close to the chocolate cake recipe we were looking for.

So that’s my “voluntary extra task”: To type all the recipes into the computer, print them out and put them back into Nana’s recipe book.

It’s quite fun, though, because so far I’ve written down about 30 recipes and came across quite a few cakes I would like to try and make myself.

So after all the typing will be done, I might take some of the recipes into the kitchen and see what happens…

A rainy happy ending to my running adventures

Believe it or not – I did it.

And – now here are the real big and somehow shocking news – enjoyed it.

RAINY HAPPY ENDING: Four Weddings and A Funeral.

Yesterday morning, I went down to the river and took my new running shoes on their first run.

And despite all former experience, I really really enjoyed it. It started raining cats and dogs, but I didn’t even curse!

You know, it was one of these epic rainfalls that usually only happen in movies when he finally finds her and convinces her that he’s the one and then they kiss and it’s terribly romantic and the viewer always thinks: “Cute, but wouldn’t it be extremely cold out there in the rain if this movie would be real life?”

That is the kind of rain I’m talking about (and yes, it was cold).

By the time I got back, I was soaking wet to the point that I may as well could have taken my tee shirt off, because it was white and my sports bra black and you know I had to walk through the old part of our town, the part where mainly old people live who sit at their windows all day long, watching the street.

I kind of have a feeling that today my Nana might ring to ask me what I was doing out there in the rain in a white shirt.

She doesn’t live in that part of town, but I’m preeeeetty sure some of her chief sources of information for the local gossip and tittle-tattle network are operating from there.

As I write, the phone rings.

Okay, Mum is answering it, so I can stay here and tell you about my other news.

On Tuesday, I bought this lovely dress:

And this gorgeous duck:

And this is one delicious cake I made the other day: (in German it’s called “Prinzregententorte” – me and my dictionary have no clue if there is an English name for it)

It was lots of work to make the several layers, but sooo worthwhile.