Baking on a Sunday afternoon!

When I was a wee slip of a girl, and that was quite some time ago! Sundays throughout Ireland were traditionally kept as 'visitors' day.

A day when aunties, uncles, grand parents, and cousins, second cousins and even thirds, descended in turn on the homes of their relatives for a 'visit', and if you were lucky enough to live in the countryside then the 'townie' relatives were sure to make an appearance!

In those days Sunday lunch was a strict 'close' family affair with only grandparents the extra additions to the family table, the extended family would then attend in the afternoons, arriving after 3 and would be gone by 6!
The preparation for an afternoon visit would see the fire lit or an electric heater turned on in the 'good room', a room which the family seldom entered except at Christmas, Easter or if the local clergyman paid a visit, or heaven forbid if there was a wake in the house, then the deceased would lie there in state. Other than that the room lay undisturbed from Sunday to Sunday, slumbering peacefully until its next guest appeared.


Unlike today, where we have the luxury of space, the skills and the desire to show off our culinary abilities to our relatives, visits of extended family would never have involved a sit down meal on a Sunday at the kitchen table nor even in the dining room, this was more likely due to financial constrictions as meat was always expensive. Instead, visitors were treated to a cup of tea and a bun, a simple queen cake that would be iced and sprinkled with those thin sugar strands called hundreds and thousands.
The more ambitious who had a few more pennies in their housekeeping money, may have even presented a boiled fruit cake or a Victoria sponge sandwich of their own making filled with the woman of the house's home made raspberry, blackberry or gooseberry jam and a layer of thick, whipped 'real' cream or butter cream.
     

At the other end of the scale the visitors might just sit down to a plate of 'Foxes' or 'Family Circle' biscuits from a tin someone had given the family as a present at Christmas.....yes these were regarded as such a luxury they were only brought out for the visitors and you would find the same tin being produced come Easter! There was of course the inevitable argument over who would get the 'pink wafer' biscuits!
The posher homes had chocolate biscuits and my how they were envied!
Still to this day the tradition of giving tins of biscuits as Christmas presents to extended family, neighbours and colleagues here in Ireland carries on, as it does in many other countries!
Although the 'Family Circle' brand still exists and their biscuit selection remains the same, it has been relegated to an everyday biscuit.
The array of 'tinned' biscuits on the market is fabulous and I can hardly wait for the supermarkets to get their Christmas offerings out on the aisles just before Halloween. Belgian chocolate selections are my favourites if anyone's interested!


 But back to Sunday afternoons. Now that nearly all of us are digitally connected twenty four seven, there is no need to do the rounds of the family on Sunday afternoons to hear all the latest gossip and other interesting stuff as we get immediate 'updates' if we follow each other, still you can't knock a visit to or from the extended family as the 'craic' is always good among the young and the elders will always have some interesting tales or some valuable words of wisdom to impart!

   
So in our house if a Sunday family get together is not on the cards and there is no other entertaining to be done, I love to have a baking session because after all the oven is on cooking the Sunday roast and there's usually a shelf or two free, so why not kill 2 birds and bake 2 cakes or buns or whatever!

A quiet Sunday is also a good day to introduce the kids to some baking and they will have loads of fun creaming butter and sugar by hand with wooden spoons and big bowls, or rolling out bits of sweet pastry and making and decorating their own biscuits.

Baking is an exact science! unlike cooking where you can experiment freely by adding maybe more spices, adding garlic or trying a different sauce with something, when it comes to baking if you don't stick to the recipe provided, disaster awaits! and it's never a pretty sight and usually tastes awful!
If you make a major faux pas when baking, the only answer is 'the bin', it's a waste I know but there's little else can be done, better to just start again.


There are certain ratios of butter to liquid, eggs to flour, sugar to spices and oven temperatures for different types of baked goods, all these are there for a reason, for example, too much liquid and you might end up with a sloppy mess, too little liquid in your pastry and it will be hard to roll out and will be tough and crack when baked, not enough eggs and you could be eating pancakes instead of sponge cakes! too much fat and you could end up with a greasy mess, oven too cool and your cake won't rise, oven too hot and the cake will rise but may be raw in the centre and overcooked on the outside....so...STICK TO THE RECIPE!

When you have got the basic recipes 'down' then you can start doing a little experimenting here and there, but nothing too drastic, once you know your basic ingredients and their relationship to one another your imagination can be boundless.
I am always looking for and thinking of new ways to adapt the recipes I already have and other ways to use those recipes. For example, I have an excellent recipe for carrot cake which is lightly spiced and always moist. Firstly I adapted it for cupcakes, which was pretty easy as all I had to do was put the mix in cupcake cases rather than a cake tin and reduce the cooking time, then I decided to make muffins, as these are a lot bigger than a cup cake size, I had to adjust the cooking times yet again.

Then I thought of how I could change the flavours. The recipe called for mixed spice to be used so I tried just using ground then grated fresh ginger on its own, then cinnamon, some orange zest, then lemon zest and lime zest, but let me tell you, carrot and orange zest with fresh grated ginger rather than ground ginger is simply marvellous!
Then I thought about exchanging the carrot for something else like grated apple or sweet potato and substituting some ground almonds for a portion of the flour. I soon found that I had to use not quite as much sunflower oil as the recipe called for as there was more moisture in the apple and sweet potato compared with carrot, and using sweet potato called for twice as much spice to give sufficient flavour as used as in the original recipe, and adding ground almonds made the mixture even more moist and the cakes last longer.

There is enormous fun to be had experimenting with flavours and fillings especially when it comes to cakes, tarts or pies.
Try combining different flavours or even coming up with ways to put a new twist on traditional items.
I love a good apple crumble, its probably my favourite dessert! As it was near Christmas, and as they were readily available in the market and seasonably 'cheap', I decided to make cranberry & apple crumble.

Now cranberries are a 'tart' fruit, as in, they can need a lot of sugar! so rather than just putting the raw fruits into the dish and adding the usual amounts of sugar, I cooked the cranberries a little before hand with the apples so I could adjust the sweetness levels before topping with a crumble mixture and baking.
With the addition of some orange zest and a little cinnamon spice I had invented the 'Christmas Crumble'

Click HERE to see what I baked today!

So don't be afraid to try a little experimenting, you never know, maybe you will be the one who invents a family recipe that will last generations!