Beauty and the Feast

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May 28 2010

19:38

Here’s the beauty…

…and here’s one of the items that featured in the feast…

You’ll have worked out what the occasion was? Our baby girl’s 21^st birthday!

What can I say about our wee girl? Well, at about 4ft 10ins, she IS wee! That, added to her sweet young face, has people thinking she is much younger than she is. She is not pleased about this! I tell her it’s hereditary!!!

She is, and has always been, the much loved wee sister of her big brother, Johnny,

(though the occasional spat is not unknown!) and they share many interests. She is very shy with strangers, but feisty and funny with people she knows well. Added to that, with her family she is very, very loving, kind and caring. She was, of course, home educated until she started university. It’s hard to believe that she’ll graduate in just over a month!

Johnny calls her a ‘geek chick’! In her last year at university she became involved in doing the lighting at the uni drama group, which she taught herself; she can work out how anything technical works without recourse to a manual; and she loves science fiction and fantasy. She also writes fantasy adventure books, which, now that her studies are over, she hopes to get ready for an agent. She is rarely seen without her iPod plugged into her ears. She has always loved reading and never goes anywhere without a few books in her bag…

Jane (or Jenny, as she’s known to family and old friends) has always been a very girly girl. Here’s a memory book page I made when she was younger:

When she was tiny, she loved dolls and pink clothes and cute wee animals. Now she squeaks over babies and, after a period when she would wear nothing but black, despite not actually being a Goth, still loves pink clothes and cute wee animals!

She is my darling daughter and I love her more than words can say!

So, on to the feast! Jane had asked for a strawberry birthday cake and who was I to deny her that? However, in my usual dotty way, I forgot that the syrup from the tinned strawberries would add a lot of sweetness and so I added the normal amount of sugar. (I tell a lie. I actually added a wee bit extra sugar because of a dotty mistake that would take too long to explain…). So when the birthday girl licked the bowl, she declared that it was very sweet indeed and suggested that I might make lemon icing to counteract this. So I did. Boy was that icing lemony! It brought tears to my eyes when I tested it! But it turned out to be a great combination and the sweetness and the watery-eye-ness complemented each other very nicely.

Yes, I did remember the candles this time, but our local shop didn’t have any ‘twos’, so it was back to the old-fashioned kind and ‘tens and units’.

Jane had her final exams at university on the two days following her birthday, so there were no high jinks with similarly harassed uni friends. Instead we had a family birthday lunch the day before with her Nana and her Auntie Syl …

I had ordered Sosmix, at Jane’s request, but it didn’t arrive in time, so we had chilli en croute instead, with potato salad made with Plamil mayonnaise; chopped salad (John’s special: spring onion, celery, red pepper and cucumber chopped up small); green leafy salad; tomato and basil rolls; trifle and the aforementioned cake…

… and on the day itself, she and I went to Glasgow and had lunch at Stereo, a vegan restaurant. Then we went to see Meet Me in St Louis at the cinema. It was so great seeing it on the big screen! My only problem was worrying about the lights coming on when there were still tears dripping off my chin!

OK! Let’s get down to recipes! What would you like? Will we start with the strawberry cake? And then follow that with the chilli en croute? And maybe the trifle? OK, then… But you’re a bit demanding, aren’t you? Sheesh!

Strawberrry Cake

Ingredients:

250g self raising flour

125g sugar

1 tin of strawberries

1½ teaspoons egg replacer

125g margarine

¾ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¾ teaspoon salt

Water

Method:

Set oven to Gas Mark 5/375F/190C

Mix egg replacer with the juice/syrup from the tin, made up, with water, to 200g. Put aside.

Mix together all the other ingredients and the egg replacer mixture.

Divide between two round cake tins.

Bake for 35 minutes.

When cool, sandwich with icing and ice the top. I used stacks of icing sugar, a large dollop of margarine and enough lemon juice to choke a whale. But I’m afraid that’s the most accurate measurements you’re ever going to get with my icing. I’m an instinctive icing maker!

Chilli en croute

Ingredients:

1 large onion

1 red pepper

250g mushrooms

500g passata

1 carton organic kidney beans

1 teaspoon Very Lazy Chilli

1 teaspoon molasses

Method:

Fry the onion, mushrooms and pepper together. I like to do them with the gas on full, stirring constantly until they’re getting nice and soft. Smells good, too!

Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a simmer and leave to cook for about half an hour. Preferably make it the day before you’re going to eat it to let the flavours develop.

Unfold some ready-roll puff pastry and cut it into two strips. Spoon some chilli down the centre of each, cut slits all the way down each side, and then cross the strips over on the top.

Bake at Gas Mark 8/450F/230C for about half an hour.

Trifle

The day before you want it, bake a chocolate cake, using the recipe I’ve already given you in my blog post about John (Penny has a Darling Lamb). Cut half off one of the layers and put it aside. Enjoy what’s left…

The next day, using your fingers, break up the piece of chocolate cake until it’s like bread-crumbs and then make up one of these

with the liquid from a tin of summer fruits made up to three quarters of a pint and brought to the boil in a saucepan. Mix in the jelly and stir. Leave to set.

Then make up another jelly, as before, but stirring in the two tins of drained summer fruits. Pour it over the solidified bottom layer. Leave to set.

Spoon most of a tub of Swedish Glace vanilla ice-cream over the top and grate some chocolate over it. I used Organica rice milk chocolate. Mmmm….

As you can see, I also made up a separate custard. You know all about that… And if you don’t, you haven’t been following my blog properly!

And that’s it! Jane is now catching up with all the books she’s been wanting to read and the films she’s been wanting to see, but couldn’t because of her studying. And it’s off to the job centre in a couple of days!