Beach and Baking

It’s finally sunny!  My family and I decided to take advantage of that fact and went for a relatively early morning walk on the beach, along with seemingly every other dog owner in the area.

Believe it or not, the beach was actually pretty busy.  *tumbleweed*

I’ve just realised that my oh-so-artistic shadow portrait makes me look like I have the world’s smallest head.  I never said I was a photographer.

I had a moment of extreme intelligence when I looked down and remarked that there seemed to be twice the number of paw prints compared to footprints.  Er…

I was feeling brave this weekend and decided to bake an actual cake as opposed to my usual cupcakes.  I’ve become a devotee of GBBO alumna Ruby’s recipes as featured in the Guardian’s Cook section and fell completely in love with the idea of a treacle ginger chocolate cake.  

Amazingly, it worked out surprisingly well.  Whenever I bake proper size cakes I’m always terrified that it won’t cook all the way through, but it all worked out.  A confession – there is a stage where you melt treacle and butter together over a low heat and add eggs, and I unfortunately ignored the ‘low heat’ instruction, which led to the eggs almost starting to cook where they collected around the sides of the pan.  Scrambled egg cake – delicious.  Luckily it was not the case.

The cake itself is very rich and quite dense, but the ginger icing stops it from getting too much.  I also had doubts about the icing, as 50g of butter looked like it would stretch to maybe a quarter of the cake at most.  But I carried on and of course the quantity was perfect.  This is one recipe I am definitely making again.