Where did it all come from

I think I had what would be called a panic attack today.  Shaking, wanting to throw up, wanting to scream and yell all the words that are saved for my darkest times, crying at the feeling of disgust I felt welling up in my stomach.  The cause?  Well, we have a room at the back of the house which is generally the children's toy room but also serves as a lovely warm sunroom in cooler weather.  I have a beautiful old miners couch against one wall so I can sit with a cup of tea and some knitting and look out into the back garden.  It's a quiet place to rest sometimes when the children are having an afternoon sleep.  Being a toy room it also, as one would expect, has toys in it, along with a bookshelf and cupboards to store our home-ed materials - workbooks, drawing books, art supplies, all that sort of thing.  It is a small room and tends to get messy quite often which is annoying (to put it mildly) but I usually manage to organise a team effort to tidy up, sometimes it seems easier to do it by myself or some days it seems to work best if I just close the door and walk away.

Today though, the three older children were having a sleep while the youngest one stayed up with me.  I haven't put my head in the back room lately.  Mainly because there is something behind the door that means I can't open it fully - a fair indicator that things are not going to be good  if I do go inside.  I've managed to avoid going in there or thinking too much about how bad it might be.  Today though, it was really the only room Marta and I could be in since it was raining outside, the sewing room was not a room I wanted to be in with an inquisitive 13 month old at that particular time (read: when I didn't want to have to bother about what she was getting into and stopping her from ripping my beautiful and much treasured craft books) and David was asleep on the couch in the loungeroom.  So off to the back room we went.

Well, I couldn't get to the miners couch, and even if I could have, there was no room on it to sit down.  The floor was covered in cushions, more cushions, toys, toys, toys and an odd assortment of ....well......, rubbish.  Plastic containers that the boys had purloined from the kitchen to hold collections of boy treasures were strewn about, most of them empty (the contents, it seemed, were mostly on the floor) along with papers, bits of Lego(even though the Lego has supposedly been packed away for four weeks because it was still not packed up after repeated (like, ten) requests last time it was out), wooden blocks, cast off clothes, a special handmade cloth doll I had bought Marta for her first birthday only a month ago..... Actually, that is when the panic attack started to kick in.  Seeing Marta's beautiful doll that I had given her to be her 'particular' doll, left on the floor by her big sister who had been playing with it, under a pile of cushions was like a smack in the face.  The whole scene just screamed at me that my children do not value what they have.  And that was another smack in the face because it means that I have failed somewhere in teaching them this.  I know that I am often saying to them that we must look after what we have but that message is very clearly not being taken in.  I am obviously not modelling that behaviour well enough myself.

So I began to pick up more cushions to make a clear space on the floor so I could see the level of damage.  And that is when the second wave of  panic overtook me.  Toys, bits of toys, things they had really, really wanted at one time or another, pencils, textas with lids off, a 300 piece jigsaw puzzle started but scattered across the floor after maybe 20 pieces were joined.  All of it just left there, with absolutely no thought for looking after what they have, and indeed, all piled over with cushions.  It was this obvious excess that filled me with disgust and literally had me wanting to throw up.  When it is all packed away it doesn't seem like so much but having it spread all over the floor made it clear just how much stuff we have in that small room.

With assistance from Marta (she found all the lidless textas for me!) I started sorting through it all, throwing a lot of things I would normally have just put away, into rubbish bags.  Every time I find myself on my knees tidying up this room I tell myself "I am not going to do this again". But of course I do.  Today, when I said it, I meant it.  This stuff was going.  I ended up with four shopping bags that went straight into the bin before prying eyes could inspect them.  A lot more things went into a big box destined for the op-shop. At some point I put Marta to bed, made myself a cup of tea and sat down to review the situation.  There had been several waves of panic throughout the time it took to sort out everything into rubbish bags, op-shop boxes and a smaller pile of things that would be kept and put back in the shelves, or packed away for awhile.  It was such an incredibly uncomfortable feeling, so much so that even now, some time later, when the panic has subsided, I still feel close to tears.  Why do we have so much stuff?  And they are constantly asking for the new this or that which, of course they seldom get, but still, we have SO MUCH!!!!

Then there is the nagging thought that Christmas is very near and well intentioned aunts and uncles will give the children more toys, more stuff that will end up in pieces on the toy room floor.  I even started composing a letter to them all explaining that really, the children have enough toys and could they please not buy more this Christmas as it is quite overwhelming.  I don't know how well that letter would be received.  And in truth, I would have to send the letter to myself as well since I am just as guilty of buying Lego kits and similar sorts of things around this time of year and at birthdays.

So what is the answer?  Allow the children fewer things?  Impose stricter discipline about how much they may have out at any given time and watch them like a hawk to make sure they pack up each thing as they finish with it?  Ugh, that second option just sounds miserable.  I have read a few articles about a movement called "Simple Living".  This is one I thought was particularly good, from a couple of years ago.  It sounds funny to call it a movement but there you have it.  These are the times we live in.  Perhaps I need to read about some more experiences of it - about people just living with a whole lot less stuff.  The stories I have read have mainly been about people without children.  How do we raise children in this age of consumerism, in a way that teaches them to honour what they have and to actually want less stuff?  It's one thing to impose that kind of rule on them but to teach them to want less is another thing altogether.  Maybe it comes back to modelling the behaviour, which is where I seem to have gone wrong.  Agggghhhhh, it all seems like there is so much thinking to be done about how I want us to live, what values I want the children to grow up with and model all of that more consciously.  Otherwise I'm just adding to the problems of overconsumption that we, in the Western world are so guilty of.  I'll let you know how we get on.

Too Many Recipes! 2. Golden Aloha Cake

This is the second in a series in which I will endeavour to cook every recipe (one each week) from a recipe book I started compiling 27 years ago when I was 15 years old.  You will find all the background for this courageous and calorie laden endeavour right here

When I read the name of this recipe, Golden Aloha Cake, I couldn't help but imagine something rather magnificent and maybe a little bit flamboyant.  Something pineappley and exotic. Something that would give you a feeling of laying under a palm tree on the beach in Hawaii, listening to a bit of this.  If you read the first post in this series, you will know that I had high expectations of these recipes.  They en captured many of my hopes and dreams of how I would live once I was grown up and living a life of sophistication out in the big world.  Imagine my surprise then, to find out that it is really just a fairly ordinary cake.  It kind of matches the surprise I felt in finding out that being grown up was not always such a sophisticated affair as I had expected. Not that the cake wasn't very tasty and not that life isn't very pleasant.  But the cake just didn't really live up to it's name. Perhaps I should have been listening to that bit of ukulele music linked above.  Instead I was listening to Brooke Fraser's music which mellows me out no end. So you can choose which you would like to listen to while you read through the rest of this.  So here is a moment in which to go to the link of your choice (remembering of course to open it in a separate tab so you can read and listen at the same time.  I'll just do something else for a moment while you organise it all  .............................................................. Okay, shall we continue?  Which did you choose I wonder?

Getting back to business now. In retrospect, had I known what I was going to end up with (which I should have because I did read the recipe a couple of times before I started) I could have planned to deliver it with a bit more pizazz.  Perhaps I should have layered it (the recipe did mention filling but I chose to ignore it) and topped it off with some beautiful golden hibiscus and some sparklers.

That said, it was a lovely cake to eat.  Just ask any of my children.  Even Ari, who is not a big cake eater, was very happy with this one.  It had a beautiful soft texture and was sweet and moist.  The original recipe in my book didn't specify an icing beyond "white frosting" so I made up a basic lemon icing which I have included in the recipe below.  And with that said, here it is now!

Golden Aloha Cake

Ingredients
3 cups self-raising flour (or use plain flour and add 2 tsp baking powder for every cup of flour)
1 1/2 cups sugar
pinch salt
1 cup milk
185g butter, softened
2 eggs
3 egg yolks extra
1/4 cup milk extra
1/3 cup pineapple juice or pineapple and orange juice
1 tsp vanilla essence
white frosting
coconut


Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (375 Fahrenheit).  Grease 2 x 20cm (8") sandwich tins and line bases.


Sift flour, sugar and salt into a large bowl.  Add milk and softened butter and beat with an electric mixer on low speed for two minutes.  Add eggs and egg yolks, beating well after each addition.  Blend in the extra milk, pineapple juice and vanilla essence.  Continue beating a further two minutes.


Divide mixture evenly between the two sandwich tins and bake for 30 minutes.  Allow to cool in tins for a few minutes before turning out onto cooling racks.
When cool, fill, cover with frosting, sprinkle with coconut.


Easy isn't it?  But it doesn't say any more about what filling or frosting to use.   This is the lemon icing I made up.  The quantities are, I am afraid, estimates as I didn't measure anything so add the liquid to the icing sugar bit by bit until you get the right consistency.


2 cups sifted icing sugar
1 tbsp butter 
2 tbsp boiling water
1 tbsp lemon juice


Melt the butter in a small bowl of boiling water.  Add the lemon juice then pour into the icing sugar and mix well.


What's to like?
I liked that this was quickly put together using a method that I had not come across before.  I have to admit that creaming butter and sugar, although it is pleasantly familiar, is not my favourite way of starting a cake.  


The texture of this cake is really something.  The softness really makes this a very edible cake.  In fact ours lasted less than 24 hours - for both cakes!!!!


What's not to like?
Apart from the disappointment over it not being quite as special looking as I had imagined (and I am still surprised at my surprise because, as I said earlier, I did read the recipe through beforehand.  The lack of spectacular decorations called for should have been a clue that this would indeed be a pretty plain looking little number) there is really not much not to like, unless you don't like soft, sweet cakes.  I will point out here, and perhaps I should have done so earlier, that there is not a very strong pineapple flavour.  In fact I don't know that I could taste it at all.  I did think of putting a bit of Malibu in but wanted to make up the original recipe before fiddling with it.  Perhaps next time I will.  

This moment - she is learning to write her name

(this moment) - a beautiful idea from Amanda Blake-Soule at soulemama.  A Friday ritual.  A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week.  A simple, special, extraordinary moment.  A moment I want to pause, savour and remember.

A call to craft from Amber.

Today had just been one of those really crappy days when things go wrong.  I had not slept well last night, laying awake trying to work out why a singing project I had been trying to get going for the local home-schooling community wasn't working out so was already tired and irritable.  We had a paediatric appointment for Marta which we were running a little late for but could still just have snuck in on time if the car hadn't broken down on the way.  So I decided we could walk the rest of the way.  I had the four children with me but I figured that it wasn't that far, I had the pram in the boot for Marta and yes, we really would be late but we might still be able to get in.  But the children had been picking up on my mood of irritation and distraction all morning and were in no mood for this.  Plus Jovanka had worn a pair of shoes which are fine to play in but not good for walking, especially when that walking has to be done quickly.  So her shoes kept slipping off which was making her really cross and she ended up standing in the street crying because it was all just too much.  At that point it all just got too much for me as well.  I turned the pram around announcing that we would be going home.  I am sure that the man walking past with his dog saw the dark storm cloud hanging directly over my head.  We marched back to the car, I was able to at least start it and we crawled home at 10km/h with the children under strict orders to say nothing.  Not my finest hour.

A little later that day I had to tip out a full 2 litre carton of milk because it was off although it was still well within it's use by date, so we had no milk.  That's a big deal at our house because no milk means no cups of tea and that is not good.  The gnocchi I made for dinner disintegrated into mush when I cooked it, for the third time in a row.  I am no gnocchi novice.  I have cooked dozens of batches successfully but for the last few months it has been touch and go.  I don't know if I've lost the touch or if potatoes are just not what they used to be.  Okay, so it's probably me.  Anyway, that left us without dinner so quickly cooked up some pasta to go with the napoli sauce that was supposed to go with the gnocchi.  To add to this, I found that I was noticing every bit of mess as I walked through the house, and there is a considerable amount and I can turn a blind eye to most of it pretty well most days but today was not going to be one of those days.  A book arrived in the mail - a lovely book about organising oneself so that one can be a better and happier parent.  Do you think I could organise any time to sit and read it?   Short answer, No.  Long answer, Nooooooooo.  How can I get organised if I can't even organise some time to sit and read the book that will give me the magic answer?  Okay, I know there will not be a magic answer in this book but I like to pretend that there will be.  It gives me hope for a short time at least.  In the background of this day, imagine a soundtrack of two constantly squabbling boys who could not seem to get along but could not go their own ways, although the suggestion was made to them several times.  Yep.  Crappy day.  And it all came down to my mood which I just did not have the energy to try and turn around into a positive one.

And then (thankfully there was an "and then" otherwise who knows where the day might have ended up)  I read this post by Amber at Mama Moontime and quite suddenly my outlook changed.  Amber is calling for contributions of small hand-crafted gifts to make up an advent calender for her 3 year old niece who was recently diagnosed with leukemia, and for her brother and sister.  Any gifts received in excess of what is required for the advent calender will go to children at the Sydney Children's Hospital. There is more to it than this.  Amber has put a great deal of thought and imagination into the organising of it all so please, if you are interested, have a look at her blog for more details.   I have put my name down and hope that you might also be inspired to do so.  I hope she receives thousands of pledges of little gifts.  She has already given me a great gift today and that is one of perspective.

Yes, lots of things went wrong in my day and yes, we were all in a pretty lousy mood for a lot of the time but do you know what?  My little girl Marta, who has just turned one is starting to walk and today, she took 10 unsteady little steps that got her about a metre across the floor.  That's not much for us but for her it was one metre closer to her Mama which is where she wanted to be.  I had not been paying attention to how big a step that is for her because I had been so caught up in my own head.  Then this afternoon we all went for a walk along the street to a neighbours house where there is an amazing mulberry tree overhanging the front gate, inviting passers-by to feast, and feast we did.  While we were there, another family who live nearby were just pulling into their driveway and wandered down for a chat.  We hadn't seen them for ages.  In fact, they'd not even met Marta  and we had not met their 18 month old son (yes it had been too long) so it was a real treat to stop for a while and catch up on news while my children ran around on the nature strip with her children and we make plans to get together again soon.  It had been such a pleasant few moments but I later put the memory of that pleasure to one side so I could continue to dwell on the negative thoughts in my head.
Reading Amber's post just put my day into perspective.

So thanks Amber for a kick in the pants reminder to think of others and be thankful for what we have.  May your days be blessed.

Too Many Recipes! 1. Viennese Chocolate Cake

This is the first in a series in which I will endeavour to cook every recipe (one each week) from a recipe book I started compiling 27 years ago when I was 15 years old.  You will find all the background for this courageous and calorie laden endeavour right here

Recipe number one in my little black book of cakes and biscuits is an odd one for a Viennese Chocolate Cake.  Odd, I say, because it has crushed cornflakes scattered over the top.  I don't know that much about traditional Austrian cooking but I'm pretty sure there weren't a lot of crushed cornflakes floating around the kitchens.  So I'm not at all sure what makes this cake particularly Viennese, but I did find that I was humming The Blue Danube for most of the day that I made this cake and thinking of the Viennese Waltz, which one might dance to this beautiful music.  In fact, I am listening to it now via YouTube.  Click here and you can also listen to it while you read the rest of this post if you like (just open it in another tab so you read and listen at the same time).  I'll wait a moment while you organise it................................................Oh, and please excuse me while I change fonts.  Right, here we go.

Viennese Chocolate Cake

For the cake:
125g butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted (I use plain flour with 4tsp baking powder - 1 tsp to each 1/2 cup flour)
1 tsp instant coffee
1/2 tsp vanilla extract or essence
1/2 cup milk
60g chocolate 


For the topping:
60g butter
1/2 cup walnuts
1/4 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup lightly crushed cornflakes
1 tsp cinnamon


For the Mocha Cream:
300ml cream
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp instant coffee
1/2 tsp vanilla

Method:
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celcius / 375 Fahrenheit, making suitable adjustments if you have a fan-forced oven, which I don't.  Grease and line the bases of 2 x 8" (20cm) sandwich tins.


In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. If the butter is too hard, I sit the bowl in an inch or two of hot water in the sink for a couple of minutes to soften the butter a little but just make sure the tap is turned away from the bowl so it can't drip into the butter and sugar mix.  Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition


Chop up the chocolate roughly and melt it in a heatproof bowl over simmering water.  When it is completely melted, add it to the cake mixture along with the instant coffee.  I made the mistake of using granulated coffee without dissolving it in hot water first.  I actually put it in with the melting chocolate, thinking the heat would dissolve the granules.  It didn't, so I got little grains of coffee in my cake.  While it wasn't a big mistake, next time I would dissolve it in 1/2 a teaspoon of boiling water or, if you're not big on instant coffee, you could use a teaspoon or so of a really strong espresso shot and enjoy drinking the rest.


Now fold in the sifted flour, alternately with the milk.  You should end up with a fairly thick-ish cake batter.  Divide the mixture between the two sandwich tins.  I didn't have any of these so used a couple of 22cm cake tins which meant my cakes were not as high as they should have been.  I will have to buy some sandwich tins though as quite a lot of the recipes in this book seem to call for them.  Make up the topping according the instructions below and sprinkle over one of the cakes.


Bake the plain cake for 30-35 minutes and the cake with topping for 45-50 minutes.  Leave to cool a few minutes in the tins before turning out on wire racks.  The cake with topping is a little tricky as the crumbly bits wanted to drop off so it had to be done very quickly and deftly.  Leave them to cool completely then refrigerate several hours or overnight.  I imagine that the intention here is that the cakes would be wrapped in plastic wrap before they're put in the fridge.  Instead, I wrapped them in tea-towels and left them in the pantry overnight..


Slice the cakes carefully in half so you end up with four layers.  Sandwich them together with the Mocha Cream, keeping the layer with topping for the top (of course!).  Spread the sides of the cake with Mocha Cream also then chill before serving.  This last point about chilling the cake is well worth observing.  We cut into ours straight away and it was quite dry and disappointing.  However, after it had been left a few hours it was much, much better.  The cake had absorbed some moisture from the Mocha Cream (don't know why I feel compelled to give that capital letters) and it was quite delicious.  The next day it was still very good but the crunchy topping had lost some of it's crunch.


To make the topping:
Combine walnuts, sugar, cornflakes and cinnamon in a bowl.  Melt butter and mix gently into dry ingredients.


To make the Mocha Cream:
Combine all ingredients in a bowl, stirring gently but do not beat. This time I did dissolve the coffee granules in a tiny bit of hot water (1/2 tsp) and it worked beautifully.  Chill for several hours or overnight (while the cake is also resting) then beat until well thickened.




What's to like about this cake:

• I liked that it used melted chocolate instead of cocoa in the cake.  It was an interesting way of making a chocolate cake that I hadn't come across before.
• I also liked that is was, despite the fanciness of the name, quite a basic cake to make but it produced something that looks a little bit special.

What's not to like:

• I had to be a bit more organised than usual (not my strong point) to put this all together as components had to be made and then left for several hours.  I am generally inclined to choose recipes that can be made up and eaten almost immediately.  Even waiting for cakes to cool down to be iced can sometimes be too much as little hands will be picking bits off the edges as soon as the cake hits the cooling rack. 
• I ended up making the cake and the mocha cream in the evening so they could sit overnight and be ready for morning tea the next day.  Otherwise, they would need to be made early in the morning to be ready for afternoon tea or dessert.  Not too much of a hardship altogether really, just a bit of time management. 

Too Many Recipes! And so we begin.

Long, long ago, many lifetimes ago it seems, there was a girl growing up in the Mallee in the north-west of Victoria.  She lived with her father and two older brothers and spent her days going to school, spending time with friends, making things, going for walks through the bushland that surrounded her home and dreaming of one day making a home of her own, with a good man and five children to care for and love.  The girl imagined sewing and knitting clothes for her children, just as her own mother had done and baking all sorts of good smelling delights for their afternoon teas.  In these ways, she would show them how much they were loved.

So, she bought an exercise book, decorated the outside of it and began collecting recipes, just as her own mother had done many years before.  Soon after, the first book was given the company of two more books.  The first was for cakes and biscuits, the second for savoury dishes and the third for desserts.  Each recipe added was another layer to the dream life the girl imagined for her future self.  Images of aprons, dustings of flour, bountiful casseroles laid out on a checkered tablecloth and around the table, happy, healthy, well-fed children who glowed in their mother's love.

It has to be said though, that there was a degree of duality to the girl's recipe collecting.  Along with the wholesome casseroles and nut-loaves that would nourish her children's growing bodies, there were recipes that spoke to the girl of a different lifestyle; a lifestyle of sophistication and glamour, of dinner parties with interesting guests and of menus with a hint of continental influence.  All a far cry from the meat and three veg that she was used to cooking for her father and brothers each night, or the scones, anzac biscuits and tea-cakes she baked on weekends.  So into the girl's recipe books they all went, the wholesome one-pot cook ups and the fruit cakes feeling a little dowdy and colloquial next to the French Quiche Lorraine,  the grand Sacher-Torte and the Italian Cappucino.

 Years passed.  The girl left the Mallee and eventually found herself living in one of Melbourne's cool inner suburbs. The books had long been filled and were added to with more notebooks and folders, and the ultimate, real shop-bought cookbooks by the likes of Stephanie Alexander, Jamie Oliver, Stephano di Pieri, Nigella Lawson and Charmaine Solomon; books on baking, preserving, and the ultimate chocolate cookbook, Marcel Desaulinaire's 'Death By Chocolate'.  Friends gave her a subscription to Gourmet Traveller and she read about all manner of exotic ingredients, cooking methods she had never imagined and kitchen gadgetry that would ensure she looked like a serious home cook.  She read about restaurants and dinner party menus that made her girlhood imaginings of sophistication look as dowdy and colloquial as the casseroles and fruit cakes had previously.  She scorned the supermarkets in favour of South Melbourne's fresh vegetable markets, the Asian markets lining Richmond's busy Bridge Road, bustling Prahran market, bought only fresh, handmade pasta and eventually made the rather expensive shift to organic produce.  She was on her way to becoming a food snob.

More years passed and the girl (for she still felt quite young on the inside, despite the lines at the edges of her eyes and the beginnings of grey in her hair) left the big smoke to raise her soon-to-be-born babe closer to her sisters in the regional city of Geelong.  In the blink of an eye (or so the intervening nine years seemed) she was mother to four and wife to none.  As her babies grew up, she found that they didn't like a lot of the foods she had become accustomed to eating.  Singapore Hawker Stall Noodles were refused, Chicken Butter Masala caused noses to be turned upwards, Pad Thai was sent packing.  It seemed these children of hers wanted (horror of horrors), meat and three veg; the very thing the girl had been running away from since she had left home.  So she reaquainted herself with the dishes of her childhood, the dishes her mother had cooked for her when she was little, the dishes she had cooked for her father and brothers.  But, as she so often did in life, she did them her own way.  Familiar recipes were tweaked (although there were some she wouldn't dream of changing),  menus were adapted to suit the tastes of her growing family, she learned to make her own pasta with fresh eggs laid by her brood of hens, and her children grew.  Strong, healthy and happy just as she had dreamed of all those years ago.

The funny thing is, that the very first recipe book she started, way back then, had hardly ever been used except for a few absolute favourites.  The Hungarian Chocolate Pancake Cake, the Petite Roulades and even the good old Sacher Torte sat quietly unnoticed as the girl whipped up batches of Anzac Biscuits, Butter Biscuits and Dutch Orange Cakes from her high school cookery book, banana cakes, rock buns and cinnamon teacakes for her hungry children.

One day the girl wondered to herself, and then to her sister, "What if I cooked every recipe in that first book?  One recipe a week. Just to see if they're any good."  After all it seemed a shame to have all those lovely sounding recipes sitting there untried.  They both agreed that it was a fine idea indeed although, at that rate it would take about three years to get through just that one book and a lifetime to get through the whole collection, even if she stopped collecting recipes that very day, which I can assure you, she will not.

 Inspired by the film 'Julie and Julia' but with no such expectations of fame, the girl decided to record her baking triumphs and failures in her blog.  So she made herself a cup of tea, opened the book to recipe no. 1, dated May 1984, a Viennese Chocolate Cake, written out in her best teenage handwriting and made a shopping list, written out in her scrawling grown-up handwriting.  Then, when time permitted, she put on her apron, and began creaming the butter and sugar, losing herself in the familiarity of the motion.