Current Weather at Strickley

Monday 31 January 2011

A recipe for disaster

As part of the "Lady of Leisure" regime I'm trying to keep the cake and biscuit tins topped up with home mad goodies. So far it's been fairly painless - though some cakes do seem to disappear far too quickly. But today's baking session descended into chaos. Not one to do things by halves I mixed a big bowl of plain cake mixture and used some of it to fill two sandwich tins. I added cocoa powder to the rest and filled thirty cake cases. So far so good and only a slight darkening on one side of the sandwich cakes. Opting for a simple finish I decided to decorate the chocolate cakes with glace icing and chocolate "sprinkles". Last week I tidied up the food cupboard and decanted packets of dried goods into rows of neat plastic containers. Some looked rather similar, so I labelled. But some were easily identifiable(!). I painstakingly sieved icing sugar into a bowl and added warm water. It took up much more than I was expecting and suddenly formed a rock solid lump. Not icing sugar, but cornflour. Clean bowl, more sieving - this time with the correct sweet white powder. I then added the water - but in the same quantity I'd used for the wrong version. Result - a bowl of opaque sweet liquid. Threw in  the rest of the icing sugar lumps and all, beat vigorously and dolloped on the cakes. Shook the sprinkles over as the icing dripped through the cooling rack onto the table. Hopefully they will taste better than they look. All I have to do now is scrub the table and fill the sandwich cakes (it will have to be just jam as I have unsurprisingly run out of icing sugar for butter cream)

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