The very best Marmalade Cake in town ...

Yesterday I made a cake.  And, as a cake is a bit of a celebration over here at Talk-a-Lot Towers, I thought I'd better search around for something to celebrate. So having missed St. Pat's and Mother's Day it's a Vernal Equinox and Total Solar Eclipse Cake. How's that for something to celebrate?

Happy Vernal Equinox (on Friday) everyone!

The truth is this cake and I started out together about a week ago. We have history. Sad muppet that I am, I decided to make myself a Mother's Day Cake. The story gets even sadder as I put my experimental mixture into a cake tin that was way too small, which resulted in a cake explosion over the sides of the tin and all over the base of the oven. Then, not satisfied with the mess I'd made, I opened the oven door before the cake had finished rising, and the whole thing flopped. And then, when I finally extracted it I discovered that it was welded to the fancy cake mould, which, contrary to what it said on the label, really wasn't non-stick and ought to have been buttered like an oil-slick pre-launch.

It was cake-carnage, my friends. A great big tripple-whammy of a disaster.

Undaunted, and with a terrier-like determination that would put the Wonder Dog to shame, I tried it again the next day in a humble loaf tin. It was carefully greased and left in the oven for the requisite period of time without any curious door-opening to have a close-up on how the whole thing was getting along. And the result was pretty finger-licking good, even if I do say so myself.

Now the stealth ingredient here, which makes my cake just a little bit epic is the marmalade. It really is good. In fact, to state it plainly, if you like fragrant cardamon notes in your clementine orange marmalade, it's the marmalade of your dreams.  You can check it out here: Cardamon and Clementine Marmalade. It carries those wonderful top notes of cardamon into the cake, and it really is worth getting fat for. If you don't want to faff around making my special super-duper taste-it-in-your-dreams marmalade you can just substitute a tasty alternative of your own. I won't be too prescriptive but do bear in mind that your choice is important: the bottom line is that this cake will only ever be as good as the marmalade you make it from.

Anyway if you'd like to get your chops round some special marmalade cake, here's my recipe:

Ingredients

150 g butter
150 g caster sugar
1 large clementine (You could use any other small orange that you can lay your hands on. Blood oranges are good but their season is so short. My favourite citrus fruit is the clementine so I tend to use those whenever I can.)
2 large eggs
75 g of truly superb marmalade
150 g self-raising flour

And some icing sugar to dust on top of the cake once you're done.

1. Heat the oven to 180ºC  and line/ butter a smallish cake tin. For this recipe I have used a 1 1/2 pint Bundt pan. Alternatively you could use a 20cm x 11cm x 7cm loaf tin. If you're planning on using a Bundt pan make sure to grease it really well and sprinkle a dusting of flour on too for good measure.

2. Beat the butter and the sugar in the mixer until they are light and fluffy.

3. Whisk the eggs, and add them slowly to the mixture, a little at a time. Beat until they are uniformly mixed with the butter and the sugar.

4. Finely grate the skin of the clementine and add it to the mixture along with the marmalade. Mix until everything is uniform.

5. Fold in the flour. It's best to do this by hand with a big metal spoon. Keep going until all the flour has been absorbed without trace. It doesn't take very long so it's not too onerous to mix.

6. Spoon the mixture into the greased/ lined cake tin. Do not fill the cake tin to more than 3/4 of its depth, otherwise you risk a cake explosion over the sides, which is not pretty.

7. Bake for about 40 minutes in the oven, resisting all temptation to open the door and take a peek for the first 20 minutes or so. Check it after 35 minutes to see whether it's ready.

8. When it's done (a skewer, pushed in and then pulled back, should come out clean) take it out of the oven and leave it to cool.

9. When the cake has cooled dust the top with a sprinkling of icing sugar.

Enjoy in the sunshine after the excitement of the solar eclipse (fingers crossed) with a nice pot of tea.

All the best,

Bonny x

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The very top of the morning to you!

And a very Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

May the Good Saint  turn the sunny side up for you.

Slán,

Bonny x

Free ebooks from Bookbub ...

The other day a friend told me about Bookbub.

Have you heard of it? It's an internet site that directs you to book promotions. The publishing houses discount books from time to time to promote new or even well-established authors, and increasingly they're pushing lost leaders with up to 100% discounting. That means, in normal parlance, my friends that in many instances they're giving away ebooks for nothing.

As an insomniac who's always looking for something to read in the dead of night on her iPad the site works quite well for me. Every so often someone, somewhere, seems to be pushing a book that I do rather fancy reading. Admittedly I don't find something compelling on every visit, but you can set up an e-mail alert notifying them of your preferences as to genre and author.  Then, when there's something they think you might be interested in, they send you an email to let you know about it, and you're able to download the ebook from Amazon, Kobe or whoever is offering the deal.

If you're interested in giving them a whirl their website is here: Bookbub. It doesn't cost anything to join. And they've even got some children's titles on offer.

All the best for now,

Bonny x

TGI Friday ... 5 Random things from the week that was ...

Gosh this has been a busy week over here at Talk-a-Lot Towers, but here's my random 5 for Friday:

1. Salt and Silver Photography

One of the highlights of my week was a trip down to the Tate Gallery to see their Salt and Silver photography exhibition. For anyone with an interest in social history or the history of early photography this one is a must-see. Many of the subjects from over a century and a half ago struck me as surprisingly modern. There was much in their body language and in the attitude of their poses that could have belonged to the Facebook generation.

If you'd like to know more you can read about the exhibition here: Salt and Silver Exhibition.

2. Guerilla Gardening

Last Saturday was the most glorious day. The sun shone, the sky was blue and the mercury pushed its way up to a dizzy high of 16º C. Mr B had, several weeks' earlier, promised to help me with a post-winter tidy-up outside. He'd entered the date in his calendar as the day he would devote to the garden. And boy did I get lucky with the weather!

Normally Mr B agrees totally with James Dent: A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken. 

But last Saturday I convinced him that we really, really, really had to get rid of the ivy that was growing all round our garden walls. We've got a sweet little walled garden, but that bothersome ivy had grown into a thick forest and was throwing much of it into shadow. Mr B got the proverbial bit between his teeth, and here's what the place looked like the following morning:

Impressive, huh? Well, then of course we had to spend a day and a night clearing up, but that's another story.

3. Slinky Paws returns ...

Just when I thought he'd snuffed it the Slinkster re-appeared for an early-morning raid on the peanuts. I will admit to a certain grudging affection for Slinky, and I'm fine with him eating SOME of the bird food. I only get hot under the collar when he scampers with the whole caboodle.

Old habits die hard!

4. The Wonder Dog's new game

The Wonder Dog and I have spent much of the past week hard at work in the garden. And we've been gloriously happy digging around in the dirt together, and anticipating the full glory of the spring and summer that are to come.

What's she doing leaving all these things buried out here? She'll be really happy when I bring them all safely inside again.

I've been busy planting bedding plants and summer bulbs, which has given rise to a wonderful new game of fetch. The Wonder Dog seemed to be of the opinion that I was getting terribly absent-minded in my dotage, and, no doubt intent on being helpful spent his energy digging up all those things that I'd forgotten about and left buried in the flowerbeds. Needless to say I was less than totally delighted with this assistance, but it's hard to stay cross for long with someone who's as cute as the Wonder Dog.

Well if these bulb things are so special why d'ya bury them in the dirt, huh?

5. Heritage Violets 

A few years' ago I bought some heritage violets. The sale's pitch promised that they were of the self-same strain that Victorian flower sellers used to peddle in Covent Garden. It promised me the smell of sweet nostalgia and oodles of Olde Worlde charm. I wasn't totally convinced, but the lure of a good story, and the fragrant dream of what a bank of sweet-smelling violets would be like in my garden induced me to throw my scepticism to the wind.

And I'm so glad that I did. I really have no idea if they are in any way related to the flowers of yesteryear, but they look like they could be, which is plenty good enough for me. They have wonderful long stems, which makes it easy to gather them into a posy, and they have the sweetest smell. You have to bury your nose in them to capture it properly, but they smell like those parma violet sweets that we used to have when I was a girl. The flowers are so very delicate-looking, but the plants are really robust. I've successfully divided my original plant three or four times, and got them to root in other locations around the garden. They don't seem to mind being in the shade, and they add a lovely interest to difficult shady corners where I've struggled to get anything else to grow.

And that's my random 5 for this week.

All the best for the weekend and fingers crossed the sun will carry on shining,

Bonny x

As shared on Random 5 Friday and Friday Finds

Salt and Silver photography ... faces from the 1840's

It's not every day that we get a chance to stare history in the face, and marvel at how the good folk of yesteryear looked ... well ... a bit like us, but if you mosey down to the Tate today you'll be able to do just that at their Salt and Silver exhibition. The costumes, the gentlemen's whiskers and the hair styles belong to another age, but stripped of the fashion foibles of their time, the faces that look out at us look just like the ones we see in the mirror every morning.

Look at this photograph below. It's thought that the subjects were mother and son. I wonder where Dad is, and why he's not in the frame too. They're posing in their Sunday best, and mum's seated on a chair to rest her weary legs. Her nails look like they belong on hands that work hard every day, rather than hands that get treated to time-consuming manicures. Just look at the way she's threading her arm proprietorially through that of her son; look at how she's gazing with maternal affection at her pride and joy. It's an attitude that wouldn't look out of place in a status update photo posted on Facebook today. I love how the boy's neck tie is a bit askew with a loose end jutting out too far to the left of his chin. Maybe he was proud of having tied it himself for the very first time that morning.

Many of the photos in the exhibition are small, which creates logistical difficulties for someone with terrible eyesight like yours truly. And I'm sorry if you were there at the same time as me, and I seemed to be hogging some of the exhibits with my nose as close to the glass as I dared put it. The truth is that I found those faces and portraits from the far-distant past totally compelling. I really had to tear myself away from some of them to give the rest of the people in the gallery a chance.

The whole shooting match kicked off with an amazing polymath called William Henry Fox Talbot who figured out how to make his first camera way back in 1835. Apparently he was motivated to do so because he was a bit rubbish at sketching. He'd used the camera obscura and the camera lucida to help him with his compositions and got to wondering whether he could invent some new gizmo that would capture the scene before him without needing to resort to pencil or charcoal. In time he came up with the technique of producing a negative image of the subject using paper soaked in silver iodide salts. These darkened on exposure to the light producing a negative image of the subject before them.  This negative image was then photographed again to produce a positive image. It was a fiddly process by the standards of today, but it was easier that what his rival photographer, Louis Daguerre, was doing with his cumbersome plates.

Henry Fox Talbot

The image (below) of Nelson's column as it was being constructed was taken by Fox Talbot himself. Isn't it amazing to see a scene that many top-hatted Londoners must have driven past in their carriages tut-tutting over? They probably thought it an eyesore and a huge inconvenience. And just look at all those bill posters that entrepreneurial types have stuck to the hoardings to promote their wares. How very 21st century! Look at the little wooden hut, where I'm guessing the workmen would  have locked away their tools of an evening when their day's work was done. It looks just like next-door's garden shed.

And the image below is another one of Fox Talbot's, showing the view from his hotel window in 1843 when he'd gone to Paris to promote his newly invented salt prints. Isn't it an intriguing snapshot in time of a Paris street scene with the cabbies all patiently waiting in a line for a fare?

I was enchanted by some of the bucolic scenes of country life. Just look at the wonderful image below by Paul Marès of an Ox cart in Brittany, taken in about 1857. Doesn't it look charming? Like it could have been painted by the Impressionists?

For me it is a perfect example of that soft, velvety texture that was a key characteristic of the technique, and made the image appear much more arty than the sharp definition of the contemporaneous Daguerrotypes. However, those white crosses that were painted on the wall, seemed a bit sinister to me. They jar with the gentle charcoal quality of the composition. On reading about the image I learned that they were commonly painted on walls of rural houses to warn passers-by to keep their distance when the occupants had succumbed to some awful infectious disease. That little nugget of information brought a sinister note to the idle ox cart. Was the driver suffering alone somewhere in the bowels of his home when the image was captured? Did everyone round about feel terror clench their chests when their eyes fell upon those markings? Did they all walk on by and ignore the plight of the people inside?

Or take a look at these Newhaven fishermen in the photograph below:

Do they look as though they're swaggering to you? Once again, in the age of self-promotion on social media, I find their pose thoroughly 21st century. Dressed in jeans and t-shirts they could be a bunch of lads off on a stag weekend. I wonder what they thought about getting their photograph taken? Did they even understand what the man with the strange camera was doing? Did he ever come back and show them their photograph after it had been printed?

And for me that's the lovely thing about this exhibition: it gets you started on a journey of a thousand maybes. As you look at all these individual moments in time your mind, or maybe your heart, craves the backstories and the what-happened-nexts. For anyone with an interest in either social history or the history of photography this exhibition is totally compelling.

If you'd like to go along and see what all the fuss is about for yourself you can check out the website here: Salt and Silver: A rare and revealing collection of early photography. It's running until 7th June. Enjoy!

All the best for now,

Bonny x