Chefs,
Good evening all. Today’s been another day, and I hope that
today’s been a day you might remember for good reasons. Or a day which you’re
hoping might go on and on and never end. Or maybe it’s a day with its best part
still yet to come? You never know.
Today, I choose not to write about today. My day hasn’t been
particularly remarkable. Instead, today I intend to write about the events of
Thursday evening. On Thursday evening I underwent what can only be described as
a Peach-Related Meltdown. It has, literally, taken me the past couple of days
to gather myself enough to possibly describe in words what happened on
Thursday. I’m composed and I’m recovering.
However, before I write about Thursday, I feel this story
needs some background context. To begin, I need to tell you about my
Tesco-Directed Meltdown, an event which occurred some days previously to my Peach-Related
Meltdown. These haven’t been my only meltdowns in the past weeks (it is third
year uni), but possibly they’ve been the funniest and they’ve been the only
ones not involving uncontrolled weeping. And no blog needs that.
So last week our flat got a Tesco delivery of food!
The order had been a hot topic for days, with many amendments and much hype
over recipe plans (sad but true). The delivery came in the evening and a couple
of us were pyjama-d and ready with a film on, waiting in for its arrival. Yet
THIS STORY is not one with a happy ending. Our fatty-propelled anticipation was
soon to turn to horror and, in my case, something much more…
Basically, the drama began at the door. I forgot about
the Tesco order entirely. When the doorbell went, thinking it would be a
keyless flatmate on the doorstep, I padded down to let them in and took my hot
water bottle with me. Outside there was in fact a suuuper tense, seeeriously edgy,
nooooot particularly happy Tesco man. He sounded that way but I couldn’t SEE
him. This was because he’d stacked a great tower of Tesco crates between us. He
passed the order receipt and the signature keypad for me to sign, around the
edge of these to me. I signed the keypad and waved it back around the edge of
the crates, into the night. Intimacy was lacking.
My flatmate set about dramatically shifting the crates
(my hands were full with my hot water bottle) and I settled on the stairs to
review our substitution list. There were, miraculously, only two items
substituted this week (an omen surely). Yet, even though I’d ordered the least
of ANYONE in our flat, both the substitutions were for me.
My reduced fat oven chips were substituted for full
fat and they had neither been able to provide me with my cheese pizza, or
substitute it for ANY OTHER KIND OF CHEESE PIZZA. My first thought: Was there
really no. other. cheese pizza to be found in your entire Tesco superstore? My
second thought: This is my penance for ordering pizza and chips, which I’m not
even allowed on my health kick anyway. Then, my third and final thought: I must
make up for this discretion by both refusing the fat-filled chips and never
eating a chip again.
So I explained to the Tesco man that I wanted to send
my chips back. This went down like a ton of bricks. Huffing and puffing, Mr
Tesco went through about ten crates looking for the chips before my flatmate
found them in a crate she had taken inside. Outwardly, I was embarrassed and
apologetic. Really, it was a joy to piss him off. I headed in, fuming at my
lack of freezer food, and burdened by my failure as a human for having ordered
such shit.
Then THINGS GOT WORSE. We started putting things away
in cupboards. I was gathering my treats together on the living room floor. As
this sorting went on, and less things were left in crates, I realised that my
cartons of cupboard-keep OJ weren’t there. I’d decided to stockpile and had
ordered four cartons, but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, there were 4
cartons of refrigerated OJ that no one was claiming and THEY COULDN’T POSSIBLY
BE FOR ME. But they were.
I launched a tirade of insults against Tesco and
attempted to wedge all the OJ onto my fridge shelf, creatively removing items
from packaging in order to make space. Words were being said and I was putting my cupboard items away. Arranging nuts by size and colour. Making sure the labels of all tins faced forwards WHEN I SAW THAT NOT ALL OF MY TINNED PEACHES HAD COME IN JUICE. Some were juiceless. Some were in syrup. Tesco had, incredibly, got half of my tins right and half of them wrong. They’d got half of them wrong. Half of my peaches were covered in syrup. I don’t like syrup and my fridge shelf was a joke and I had no pizza and no chips. And I picked up the phone.
The Tesco customer service helpline REALLY were not
prepared for what came. I literally, just, I was silent for a very long time
while I waited in the queue. And then let rip. I was saying things like “This
BLATANTLY isn’t what I ordered IS IT”… “My peaches just aren’t right!”… “What
if I were allergic to syrup, eh?”… and “How does a person store that much
juice??”. All of this shrilly shrilled at a pitch barely audible to Tesco or
mankind.
So after scaring this lady and scaring my flatmates,
our account was credited with a refund for my OJ and my peaches (even the ones
that had been correctly delivered in juice). I had my way. I am very grateful
to Tesco. I hung up the phone and went to bed.
You will be pleased to hear that I made a full recovery from
my TDM and it wasn’t spoken about the next day in our flat. That weekend I went
home to visit family and my sanity was restored. I voluntarily returned to
Newcastle and to uni and there were no meltdowns from me for a full week.
Then, on Thursday I was rearranging my cupboard again (a
pastime) when I came upon the peaches in syrup, once more. They were where I
left them. In my cupboard. So, inspired to turn their dreadful occurrence into
something joyful, I set about baking them into a cake for me and the flatmates
to enjoy. I was going to bake peach cake!
It was great. I found a recipe on Google. Before long I was
creaming away, simmering things, mixing it up, stirrrring arrrround. I had
Elbow on my iPod. The scene was very chilled. All was at ease. All was good in
the world. My mix was looking good. I arranged peaches artistically in a swirl.
It all came together and the cake was looking lovely! Lovely.
So I put it in the oven and I’m washing the dishes. My iPod was
out and I could hear a dripping sound. The tap wasn’t running, so where was it
coming from? What was dripping? Something was splatting. And then I realised…
that sound was coming from inside the oven.
In slow motion, I turned. I opened the oven door. CAKE MIX
WAS LEAKING FROM MY TIN. It was coming out of the bottom and dripping onto the
floor of the oven. It was leaking. It was a tin with a push-up base and somehow
mix was getting out of a gap between the tin and the base. It was all going
wrong. My cake was being ruined. At super speed, I took a baking tray, put it on
the floor of the oven, and shut the door as quickly as I could.
Alone in the kitchen, I contemplated the situation. Things
were not looking good. I tentatively decided to open the oven door a crack and
peeked inside. My baking tray was half full with mix. It was filling quickly. I
shut the door. What to do? What to do? I could not solve this myself. So, I ran
and found a flatmate.
Without leaving spaces between any of the words, I tried to
say what was happening and tried to ask for help. I was a lot like:
“BiddypeachestherescaketheovenbutmypeachestheresitleakingtheresthetinsitsitsallitsonthebottomitsnotinititsleakingiBIDDYIDON’TKNOWWHATTODOOOO”
So, my flatmate stepped in. She explained that we needed to
move the cake into a new tin. One that didn’t leak. I greased a new tin while
she prepared a spatula. We had to chuck it all from one to the other. Cake
every-bloody-where. The peaches stopped being in a swirl and they mixed into
the mix. Then my flatmate managed to scrape the partial pancake that was the
other half of the mix away from the baking tray it was stuck to. She stirred it
into the main mix. And she returned it all to the oven. Forlorn.
I took a half hour lie down while the cake baked. Meditated
upon occurrences. Baking NEVER GOES WRONG FOR ME. I’m really good at it! I’m on
the committee of the uni’s baking society! My banana bread is LEGENDARY. If I
can’t bake, what am I doing??? And really, today, I’m still pondering that
question.
The cake baked and, as my flatmate assured me, it came out
edible in the end. It was a baked-with-love type of looker. It had welded
itself to the new tin. But it was warm and all the ingredients were still there
and we managed to scrape it out onto little plates and eat it with forks. The
kitchen smelt homely. My creation had a gooey texture like a steamed pudding
and it was sweet right in the back of your throat like a treacle sponge. It was
cake.
So, life went on. I have lost all faith in my abilities as a
baker. But I washed my plate and my fork, and I went to bed. I woke up the next
day. I went on to continue with my life and my blog. So my life. But things are
NOT OK with baking. In light of this, I doubt I will ever bake anything
involving syrupy peaches ever again, or ever again associate with the syrupy
peach. But, to its credit, there was nothing to fault with the recipe I used,
and it even tasted good despite all that went wrong.
So, here I include the recipe for how to bake and enjoy your
very own, too…
Recipe: Peach Cake
(Based upon a Food
Network recipe, which you can find here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/caramel-peach-upside-down-cake-recipe.html)
Time Taken: 90 minutes
Ingredients: For the
caramel peaches ~
A little butter, 130g granulated sugar, I heaped tablespoon
of golden syrup, a splash of water, 2 tins of sliced peaches in light syrup
For the cake ~
50g plain flour, 75g corn flour, half a teaspoon of baking
powder, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, a pinch of salt, 100g butter,
125g granulated sugar, 2 eggs, 100ml sour cream
How to make your Peach Cake in ten easy steps:
1. Preheat the oven to 180˚C. Using butter, grease the sides
and base of a deep cake tin (ONE WITH A FIRMLY ATTACHED BOTTOM). Line with
greaseproof paper and then spread more butter over this. Look your heart attack
in the eye.
2. Measure your sugar, golden syrup and water into a saucepan
and heat this on a hob. Stir until the sugar dissolves. After about 5 minutes,
your goop should turn an amber-caramel shade. When you think so, take it off
the heat and pour into your prepared cake tin. Set aside to cool.
3. Pour out your tins of peaches into a sieve and leave the
syrup for a small while to drain off of the peaches and into a bowl.
Contemplate. Your next task is to arrange these peaches in a pattern amidst the
caramel in the base of your cake tin. Which pattern will you decide on? Have
you ever considered peach design before? How ambitious do you want to be? The
decision you face now will majorly impact upon the finished cake’s look. Choose
wisely.
4. Having arranged your peaches, set the cake tin aside. Take
out a large mixing bowl and measure into this bowl your flours, baking powder,
bicarb of soda and your salt. Grab yourself a wooden spoon and stir these all
up.
5. In a separate, smaller bowl, use a fork to cream together
your butter and sugar. Then, use the rim of this bowl to crack your eggs into
the buttery mix, one at a time. Stir in the egg until your buttery mix becomes
an oily, swimmy, very unappealing looking concoction.
6. Add half of the oily mix to your bowl of dry ingredients
and stir. Then add your soured cream and stir some more. THEN add the second
half of your oily mix, and do some really good stirring.
ChefBeHere Top Tip: You don’t want to knock the air out of
your cake mix by stirring it too violently. You definitely don’t. But nor do
you want to under-stir your mix and be left with lumps of whole ingredients.
Your foodies won’t appreciate a lump like that in their mouth. They might spit
it out and force feed it to you. The solution to this dilemma is to stir your
mix gently but effectively, at a steady pace. Take care to keep all the mix
moving, so that parts aren’t left untouched while others go around and around
like it’s Formula One.
7. When it seems light, pale and fluffy (and a finger test
confirms that it’s tasting good), pour your batter into the cake tin, so that
it evenly covers your peach design. Carefully transport this tin of cake mix
into the oven.
8. Bake the cake until it becomes golden brown and a sharp
knife stabbed into its middle comes out clean. I put some tin foil over mine
for the last ten minutes, as I was worried that the top seemed golden but the
middle seemed uncooked. In the end though, it is a very gooey cake as there’s
so much juicy fruit inside it. In light of this, I doubt you’re ever going to
get a knife that comes out totally dry, due to all the juice in the cake. At
the end of the day, it’s your call as to when you’re ready to take out of the
oven. Don’t be rushed.
9. Cover the tin with tin foil and leave the cake to cool in
it, on the side for 20 minutes. Exercise patience. When the time’s up, run a
sharp knife around the edge of your cake to prise it away from the edge of the
tin, and tip the cake out onto a cooling rack (if you have one, a plate will do
otherwise). Fill the tin with warm, soapy water and leave to soak.
10. Slice your cake up into decent chunks and serve warm to
your hungry housemates!
Here’s how my baby turned out, I hope you had more luck than
me!
So, what do you think of peach cake? Should peach and cake be
mixed? Should you do it like this? It is a taste sensation? Is the recipe easy
to follow? Would you make it again? Did your fork-holders give rave reviews?
Was everything disaster-free or did any calamities occur?
Chefs, I have faith in you. I believe there’s a reader out
there who’s more capable of taking on this recipe than me. And, for you, I hope
that it turns out wonderfully. For the rest of us, using forks to gather
together some of our steamy, gooey, treacly, MESSY MONSTER CAKE… there’s always
next time. Life’s peachy.
Bake on my lovelies,
Hayley
