The cake of many colours

'Would you like a Herman?' asked the Chief of All the Numpties, all cheerful and pleased with himself. Unwilling to commit to something without knowing anything about it, I requested further details. 'It's this cake that you grow, you feed it and stir it then you cook part of it and give some away and keep some to feed and stir the next week.' I had a dim memory of mum having something like this when we were little, and more recently I remembered my own nurturing of a ginger beer plant, which produced wonderful ginger beer and elevated our weekly sugar consumption to dizzying and unsustainable heights. Enhanced cake consumption would also probably be rather a bad idea, but I quite fancied giving it a go for a bit.

On the Day of Herman Giving, I arrived at work to discover a cheerful orange carrier bag on my desk, and nestling within it a former vegetable soup tub now housing 100ml or so of beige gloop. This was Herman. He was accompanied by a printed note announcing who he was, forbidding his being placed in the fridge lest he should die, and a schedule for his care, cooking and consumption. I pulled the lid back a smidge and was immediately hit with an aroma which combined beer with bakery. Result!

Throughout the day, as I checked on him, I could see that he was growing and growing. After my return from lunch, having forgotten about him, I heard a rustle from my left hand side. I peered across to my next-door colleague but he wasn't there. The noise must therefore have come from Herman. This spooked me just a little bit. Tentatively, I pulled away the carrier. The soup tub was completely full, and the previously flat lid was alarmingly convex. Without thinking, I broke the seal, and with a commendable pop, the buildup of gas within ejected a quantity of Herman over my hands, the bag, and my desk. I may have squeaked in surprise just a little bit. My colleague-in-opposition squealed like a girl, leaped to his feet, muttered in alarm about 'the spores, the spores!' and ran to open a window.

I left him with his lid at a jaunty angle for the rest of the day, and with no further incidents got him home in one piece. I decanted him into a bowl and covered him with a linen cloth, giving him quite the air of mystery and discretion. I introduced him to Junior by telling him that he'd been an only child for long enough and would he like to meet his new brother. He looked alarmed for a second and enquired whether he'd need to share his inheritance with the new arrival; reassured that he wouldn't, he welcomed him in anticipation of baking time next week...

Herman's schedule was based around a ten day cycle. I followed this for the first week but then, not having access to a decimal week, I decided to train him to adapt to a seven day cycle - I can't be doing with baking on different days each week

He gets fed twice a week - one cup each of sugar (I mostly use demerara), plain flour, and milk (I use soya milk). After the second feed he is split into four equal parts: one to keep for next week, one to bake, and two to give away to any willing victim you can find. I have had some success with the Brazil Nut, although she was rather worried about caring for him all week. In the end I pointed out that I can just give her a portion every week and she can go ahead and bake it, and this seemed to her to be an excellent arrangement. If I don't have a recipient for the second giveaway portion, I just make two cakes...

The new arrival


Feeding time at the zoo


All full up


The mixture for my first bake - oil, flour, raisins, baking powder, sugar, eggs and two apples (which I loosely interpreted as meaning 'any old fruit that's lying around and needs using up' which explains why you can see apple, pear and chopped up grapes, one of which looks a bit like a slice of leek but isn't, I promise.


The recipe instructed me to scatter sugar on the top of the cake then to chuck melted butter on before baking. As I would be turning my cake out of the ring mould, I bunged some sugar and butter in the base. Turned out the butter was irrelevant but the sugar has been a constant fixture in subsequent bakes.


Just out of the oven


My First Herman



A slice through an apple and cinnamon delight


His second incarnation, banana and blueberry




Number three - coconut, lemon and apricot


Number four - a reprise of apple and cinnamon




And number five - ground almonds, grated apple, dates and ginger

No, not like the Italian dictator...

This week's first-time-make was a cream mousseline topping and filling for a coffee and walnut cake. Delia told me to do it.

Tallboy had watched Masterchef yearningly the day before and having seen a parade of patisserie, had evinced a deep longing for a coffee and walnut cake. He then buggered off for the day to give me space to roll up my sleeves and get baking. Indeed, he timed it so well that just as I heard his key in the lock, the oven started beep-beep beep-beep beep-beep to tell me to get the cakes out.

As I had doubled up the cake mixture, I decided to double up the topping/filling too. It seemed only fair. The trouble with doubling things up in your head isn't the simple things like using 120g of sugar instead of 60g. It's when you try to get clever with tablespoonsful and translate them into ml and then into other measurements. Being lazy, I'm not keen on repeated small actions. I'd rather do a single action. That's why I wrote all that code at work, so that I could achieve in a single click what it would otherwise take minutes or even hours of clicking to do. So if a recipe wants 4 tablespoons of something, a quick multiply by 15 gives me the total ml, then I wrestle the appropriate cup measure from the hook and Bob's your uncle - a single measurement. I needed 4 tablespoons of water, 4 x 15 = 60ml. Except of course that I was doubling up, so make that 8 x 15 (or 4 x 15 x 2) = 120ml or half a cup measure. Brilliant. So when I go to make the sugar syrup, I have half a cup of water in my brain. I mean the idea of using half a cup of water, not hydrocephalus. Right, one half cup of water into my pan, and then another, because I'm doubling up, right?

My second deviation from the optimal was employing my old sugar thermometer. There's nothing wrong with it, it has been my trusty friend for decades. But it was a small pan, and the liquid wasn't very deep so the bulb wasn't covered. And I had to identify a temperature of between 103 and 105 °C, an operation which involves a fair bit of squinting and face-screwing-up. Had I thought about it instead of reaching automatically into the drawer for the old-fashioned kit, I'd have used my super duper digital thermometer with the probe.

The sugar syrup needs to boil gently for ten to fifteen minutes until it reaches the right temperature. At about minute 14 it suddenly struck me that I'd used too much water and that I needed to ditch this batch and start again. A further 15 minutes down the line, I was squinting through the steam and deciding that the temperature was approximately between 103 and 105 °C and this surely would be ok.

The trick was now to pour the syrup onto the egg yolks in my mixing bowl in a continuous stream while I carried on whisking with my other hand. As I poured and continued and whisked, the mixture seemed dreadfully thin and not at all cake-coating consistency. In fact, I put the pan down for a few seconds so that I could go back to Delia to check that it was actually yolks I needed - had I managed to get an Italian meringue dreadfully wrong? Delia told me that it was yolks and to get on with it.

Now I pinched bits off the unfeasibly huge amount of butter I had weighed out and whisked them in. With my right arm wilting, I decided to apply the right kind of technology and brought my electric whisk to bear, which made things much easier, but the consistency wasn't changing any. *pinch* *drop* *whisk* Is this right? *pinch* *drop* *whisk* This can't be right *pinch* *drop* *whisk* I'm just going to do a buttercream when I abandon this *pinch* *drop* *whisk*

All the butter was now in the mix but there was no way that it was going to cover the cake for more than a second or two before it succumbed to combination of gravity and its own low viscosity. I kept the whisks going while I leaned over to scan the recipe again. Yes, I'd included what was required, and done what Delia said. Maybe the temperature hadn't been quite right. Maybe I could do with reading glasses nowadays. Maybe I'd been right the first time with the water. I turned back to the sloppy contents of the bowl and regarded them idly as I wondered what I should do. It was then that The Miracle happened and all of a sudden I had a workable cake topping in front of me. For a moment I thought the mixture had split or something similarly awful had come to pass, and turned the whisks off. I realised that all was ok and bunged in the coffee quickly before it changed its mind. A further tentative whisk and I had a perfect coffee-coloured and -flavoured cream for my cake.

I filled and topped (and sided) the cake, perching some half walnuts on top for a hint at the contents. The bowl scrapings were delish - very creamy but light and not too sweet. I was really impressed and very happy with the outcome, and glad that I'd kept whisking beyond what I'd thought was a sensible point.

Offering a slice to Tallboy, I tried to explain the trials I'd been through to satisfy his craving. I told him that I'd never done this kind of topping before, not a standard buttercream but a mousseline. "Oh," he said through a mouthful of crumbs, "like the Italian dictator?"

One banana, two banana, three banana, pear

I'm on record as favouring my bananas on the crunchy side. The less green and more brown they get, the more they veer into Tallboy's territory. So it was an easy decision on my part (at the behest of the boys from Bath) to take the last three spotty brown bananas in the fruit bowl and use them to make some banana bread.

This morning the postman knocked on the door and handed over a soggy padded envelope containing a bottle of something which had leaked all over the place, and an amazing Amazon package which contained a new book which had not leaked at all. This lack of leaking is only one of the many things to recommend this freshly-published book, "The Bread Revolution" by Duncan Glendinning and Patrick Ryan (the chirpy chappies from The Big Bread Experiment which aired last year).

The book is packed with photos, some to give context, some a bit of atmos, some for guidance and some just for the hell of it. I particularly liked the beardnet and the duck with a halo - my favourite image of all was the shot of the well-used loaf tins on the rack at the beginning. Despite all the pictures, the pages don't feel too busy and the recipes are well set out with plenty of thought put into their presentation; I couldn't find a point where you'd need to turn the page while you were in the middle of a recipe apart from the particularly detailed everyday white loaf walkthrough. The style of writing is accessible and clear, and quantities are given in a variety of formats. Where yeast is an ingredient, quantities are given for both fresh and dried (it's always been a bugbear of mine where only one type is given - if you're not a confident baker you can feel precluded from trying something if you don't have the right type and aren't sure how to convert).

One of the helpful things the thoughtful bakers have done is to reassure you at various points about the texture of the dough or about what's happening, which is so useful when you'd otherwise be staring down at the bowl in front of you and wondering "should it look like that?" or "should it be doing that?". There are also asides about how you could make changes. I liked the way that they've paired up many of their bread recipes with a meal recipe on the next page, so that you're not making your bread in isolation but can pair it with their suggestions or be inspired to come up with something yourself. They've also given signposts to suppliers (most of which are my faves too), talk about tools and discuss the delights of foraging. This is very much a book about real bread by people who care about it, but it's also not just a book about real bread.

So, banana bread. Well you've got to make something when you get a new cookery book, and I'd been eyeing the daily enbrownment of those bananas with despair for a little while, so it was an easy choice.



I'm also on record as saying I never make changes to a recipe I'm doing for the first time. Except sometimes I need to. Like today. In fact, this is possibly the most non-following following a recipe I have ever done.

For a start, I needed four squishy bananas. There were three in the fruit bowl. I nipped over to see if the Brazil Nut had any lurking in hers. "What, dark squishy ones? Yeah, I had a few. No one would eat them. I chucked them out last night..." OK, what would take the place of a squishy banana? How about the squishy pear which was the only other inhabitant of the fruit bowl? Go on, then. Ah, no pecans. No walnuts, either. OK well how about we go for a full-on squish experience and soak some sultanas in orange juice for a bit - who needs crunchy bits?

Plain white flour? Nah, I reckon I'll use my precious Fattoria La Vialla wholemeal - the mashed fruit looked pretty wet, and wholemeal can cope with a bit more moisture. Golden caster sugar? Nah, I'll just use the normal stuff in my jar with the vanilla pods stuck into it. Milk? I've only got soya milk, that will have to do. Two 1lb loaf tins? I haven't even got one 1lb-er. I'll stick it in a 2lb-er and bake it a bit longer then...

I mixed up my ingredient approximations as directed in the recipe, making a sticky cookie dough-like mess, then added my mashed nanas n pear. Oh, and the drained sultanas. This turned it into a much more recognisable cake mixture consistency which I shovelled into the liner in my tin and bunged in the oven, marvelling at how quickly it heats up when you're needing cake temperature compared to bread temperature.

I gave it 20 minutes longer than directed and left it to cool on a rack while the most delicious scent filled the house. "That smells nice," is what Tallboy's mouth said, while his eyes intimated an immediate and frenzied consumption of the whole thing.



The end result is delish - moist, banana-y and decidedly more-ish. I'm going to have another slice while I leaf through the book again...

Today's batch

Today I've been making bread-for-the-week (basic white dough with a few handfuls of ground seeds chucked in), what-do-I-make-with-the-extra-bit-which-won't-fit-in-the-proving-basket, bagels (for the first time, at Junior's request) and mum's Sticky Black Gingerbread. Bagel-making writeup and SBG recipe will follow later...