ramen and cake

A four-month long almost-round-the-world holiday was never gonna be easy on the budget. But then, what holidays are? On our first week back, my mum had to buy our groceries and parents had to lend us money. Suddenly, we were first year uni kids again! Here's two things we made (one each) to lift our spirits; ramen and Nutella cake.

food for cottingley fairies: lemon almond cake with rosewater creme fraiche icing

The Cottingley Fairies would eat this cake. After a mad day flitting around some rhododendron bushes, they'd alight on top of the glossy creme fraiche icing and just dig in. It's a recipe from The Caker by Jordan Rondel which I reviewed here. 

I've baked this cake twice so far and it's consistently easy to make, easy to make look fancy, and easy to eat. There's some pretty flash ingredients involved, so make sure it's pay day or leave for a special occasion. It's dense, buttery, and moist. If you don't like the sound of rosewater flavoured icing, I think you should try this anyway. The flavours sounds intense but the end result is actually quite subtle. 

a long weekend in the sounds

Four days at this bach brought us close. We laughed until we cried over ridiculous salon games. Our dog went feral, wandering in and out of the house, chasing sticks and piling them up in heaps on the beach. Every night, there was a fire inside and a bonfire outside. Breakfasts were noisy affairs, lunches served out on the beach, and dinners scarfed down at a huge round wooden table.

peanut butter and jelly cake

This afternoon, my mother was over hassling our dog, chasing him around, hand-feeding him luncheon, and carrying him around. I didn't want to interrupt their epic love story so I kept out of the way by baking a peanut butter and jelly cake. The recipe is from The Caker. I did promise to let you know what the actual cakes tasted like once I got around to making the recipes instead of just gormlessly flipping the pages and admiring the pictures and publishing flippant reviews of it here.

The recipe calls for only 50 grams of butter, but the peanut butter icing called for 480 grams of icing sugar. Guys, a normal bag of icing sugar is 500g. That's nearly an entire bag of icing sugar. Holy heck! Though dubious, I gave The Caker the benefit of the doubt and did as I was told. Which now means I have a takeaway container full of leftover peanut butter icing in the fridge.

Ahm. Yes. "Takeaway container" is a totally legit unit of measurement.

the caker

I bought The Caker from Unity Books yesterday.

That's Jordan Rondel (aka the Caker) very delicately eating a very tiny cake.