More Cake – By Popular Request

A couple of people have asked if I could post the recipe for the cake I made when Liberty and I got together the other week and who am I to refuse? Cake is one of the greatest joys in life and Marble Cake has always been one of my favourites because it’s just so pretty and fun AND it’s dead easy to make too The basic recipe is one from Mary Berry’s Fast Cakes book and it’s really simple to tweak to your own preferences – a great hit with kids for birthdays…and big kids who just like cake…

Basic Ingredients:

6 oz / 175g soft margarine

6 0z/ 175g caster sugar

6oz/ 175g self-raising flour

1½ level teaspoons baking powder

3 eggs

1 level tablespoon cocoa/hot chocolate powder

Optional Ingredients:

Food colouring of your choice – whatever colour and however many

2 oz/ 50g Chocolate drops

2 oz/ 50g sultanas/dried fruit

Any other flavourings you fancy…

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4 and grease and line with greaseproof paper an 8″/20cm round cake tin.

Put the margarine, sugar, flour, baking powder and eggs in a bowl and beat together until the mixture is well blended and smooth.

Separate the mixture out into as many different bowls as you want colours/flavours in your cake.

If you are using cocoa, mix it with a tablespoon of hot water to make a smooth paste before adding it to one of your bowls of mixture and stirring it in. If you’re using hot chocolate powder just chuck it in the mixture and stir lots!

In your other bowls add a few drops of food colouring and mix until you get the colour you desire.

I like to put white chocolate chips in the chocolate cake mix and milk chocolate chips in the plain sponge mixture but you can do whatever you like really!

Next put your cake mixture into your tin a spoonful at a time. Do a spoon of each type of mix as you go round so that they alternate throughout the cake.

Bake in the oven for 45-50 minutes until the sponge is well risen and golden brown and the top springs back when lightly touched with your fingertips.

Turn it out to cool on a wire rack and then ice or decorate as required! – I melted a Milk Chocolate Scot block and drowned my cake in it, then melted some white chocolate and drizzled that on top of that and then liberally sprinkled the top with mini marshmallows…

Decoration is not my strong point...

How much more fun is that than just plain sponge?!

‘Kids hate reading’ and other stories.

If I had a pound for every time I heard someone say ‘kids these days hate reading’ or ‘****’s too young/old for books’, I may not be a millionaire but I’d certainly have some extra pocket-money.

They’re wrong, obviously, but nothing I do or say seems to be able to convince them otherwise. Probably because I usually end up blaming them for their child’s disinterest in the written word by saying something along the lines of ‘kids only think books are boring if they grow up around people telling them books are boring instead of encouraging them to find out for themselves.’

My nephew, for example, used to love reading his books whenever he came round to visit us but suddenly when we started seeing him a little less as he got older, books got ‘boring’. Something to do with his mother sending all their books to the charity shop regardless of whether they were read, unread, favourites or special presents? I think it may be. She thinks books have no value and therefore, it would seem, her children think the same.

This makes me incredibly sad. Nothing is better than picking up a good book and being transported somewhere else for an adventure with your new best friend. Regardless of whether you are one, eleven, thirty-two or one hundred and four, a book is a wonderful thing.

Different people like different books, always have and always will. Books I read might be your idea of tosh and books you read might be my idea of sheer tedium but that doesn’t make either of our choices bad. It just makes us different people. Picking up one book that is ‘boring’ and then refusing to read any other book on the principle that all books are the same is rubbish but, sadly, something that happens all too often.

I think some people who grow up not reading much, get the impression of ‘all books are dull’ from the fact that all the reading experience they’ve had has been from What a Bad Dog! (Oxford Reading Tree) through to Of Mice and Men – namely whatever school has thrown at them in a compulsory manner. I’d think they were pretty dull too if that were all the selection I’d had, being ‘made’ to read something almost always instantly kills the enjoyment it could bring.

Luckily for me, I was brought up in a house full of bookshelves and I devoured whatever I could reach (including two encyclopaedias from cover to cover…) and thus could never understand when my friends said they didn’t like books. There was so much to discover and explore, I couldn’t imagine going a day without creating further adventures for my current favourite character in my head as I went about my day.

As for being too young for books, my 11 month old daughter already loves her books, granted she usually has them upside down or in her mouth but she still loves them. I often go into her bedroom on a morning to discover her sitting up pointing at one of her tiny board books, grinning broadly and turning the pages three at a time.

I think what I’m trying to say is I’m afraid of current generations, including my own, missing out on the experience of reading just because of other people telling them that books are ‘uncool’, ‘boring’ and ‘a waste of time’ as well as not introducing their own children to books because they don’t see any value in the pastime.

I got endless pleasure out of reading to the point where I wanted to write my own stories, almost as a thank you to the people whose books I read, and I struggle to picture a life without all the colours and emotions brought to me through other people’s words. A life without that seems to me, a very plain one, though I’m not trying to say all kids should do is read. I love my Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and my TV, I just think that books add a dimension video games and widescreen visuals never can – your own imagination.

What is life without imagination? I simply can’t imagine.

 

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This post was linked up to TheBoyAndMe’s ShowOff-ShowCase on 19th March 2011. Click the button to see more ‘Most Popular’ Posts!