cake solves everything

Hello everyone - sorry for my longer than I planned absence. I've had a little holiday in Portugal, which was followed by a bout of flu (if one more person asks if it's swine flu, I will scream! I even had a test for it at the GP on Thursday, wherein they opened a scary sealed box filled with masks and sterile swabs...ugh!). Anyway, I think it was more exhaustion than it was flu. I normally run the 3.5 miles to work each day, but on Thursday last week I just couldn't do it. I could barely leave my living room. Hence, I've been keeping a low profile.

I've written a few posts, but didn't post them....again, out of fear that they were boring, stupid, etc. But I realise that is wrong, and my project here on Green Ink is to share what's inspiring me but also to hopefully be inspiring. In order to that I think you need to show people that you're human and you have your days when everything is hard and you wish you'd used your head and finished your law degree so you'd have a real career/more money, etc. by now. The last thing I want to be is one of those "all talk" people. So I'll probably post them later, under the dates I originally wrote them.

I've been dryer than the Gobi Desert lately in terms of writing inspiration - as you'll see from this post - and was feeling very down about it. Nearly every night TS and I waxed lyrical on our mutual creative barrenness (initially with Super Bock or a Hendricks in hand, over the last week it's been Night Nurse). Yesterday, feeling alert for the first time in four days, I was washing up and thought about making a cake. Having subsisted mostly on Lucozade and soup over the previous 48 hours, cake was an alluring prospect indeed.

But I imagined the kind of conversation that might ensue between TS and myself if I did ("Cake? When we have sore throats?! Are you crazy?") and found myself laughing at the possible scenarios. Then, when the dishes were draining, I sat and wrote a monologue about an elderly couple beset with the flu and the various goings on (ie: the wife decides to make cake when they're both ill because, like me, she thinks cake solves everything). That monologue has now turned into a short story, which I've nearly finished. It turns out that the wife thinks an eminent recipe writer has stolen her favourite cake recipe, and she goes to extreme farcical lengths to get the acknowledgement she thinks she deserves. It was fun to write.

Here's the cake that I ended up making, and which inspired the story:

Lemon-Syrup Loaf Cake

from Nigella Lawson's How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Cake:
125g unsalted butter (I used Pure dairy free spread)
175g caster sugar
2 large eggs
Zest of 1 lemon
175g self-raising flour
pinch of salt
4 tablespoons milk (I use soy)

See here for conversions

Syrup:
Juice of 1 large lemon
100g icing sugar

23 x 13 x 7 cm loaf tin, buttered and lined, preheat the oven to 180 degrees or gas mark 4.

Method:

• Cream the butter and sugar
• Add eggs and lemon zest, mix well
  
• Add the flour, salt and milk, folding in gently but thoroughly
• Spoon into loaf tin and put cake in oven for 45 mins, or until golden and a cake tester comes out clean
• While it's cooking, dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice, over a low heat or in the microwave
  
• Remove the cake from the oven, puncture holes all over the top with the skewer, and pour the syrup on to let it soak in.
  
• Wait until it's completely cold to take it out of the tin. Although I did cut two slices and served it warm-ish with Green and Black's Vanilla icecream.

Best cure for the flu, don't you know, all that lemon!