Monthly Archives: January 2016

Foodie Friday – Pineapple Upside down Cake

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It’s Friday so I’m having a Foodie Friday post. On New Year’s Day we had our ‘boys’ and their ladies visiting us and it was yet another marathon cooking day for me. Duncan, our eldest boy is dairy intolerant so I decided to bake a pineapple upside down cake for pudding. It’s always tasty, especially when eaten hot, and I think it looks quite good too.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

I used margarine instead of butter and I don’t think it makes any difference to the flavour, but I always add some vanilla extract to a plain cake mix to make sure that there will be no eggy flavour to it.

Cooking time 1 hour
Oven temperature 350 F/ Gas Mark 4/ 180 C
Cake tin – 9 inches diameter and two inches deep

Ingredients:
Base of cake:
1 – 435g tin of pineapple rings –
glace cherries
2 oz butter of margarine
2 oz brown sugar
1 tablespoon of honey or golden syrup (I think that’s corn syrup in the US)

For the cake:

5 oz butter of margarine
5 oz sugar
3 eggs
drop of vanilla extract (optional)
6 oz self raising flour

Melt the 2 oz of margarine for the base and pour it into the cake tin. Top with the brown sugar and golden syrup/honey. Arrange the drained pineapple rings onto this mixture. Add the cherries to make a nice pattern.

For the cake:
Cream the margarine and sugar, gradually beat in the eggs and the vanilla extract. then fold in the flour. Spread this mixture over the fruit and level it. You might get some of the syrup coming up to the edge but don’t worry about that.

Bake in the oven for one hour and test to see if it’s done. It might take a bit longer as every oven is different.

Put a large plate over the cake and turn it upside down, the cake should come out with no problem. This is delicious hot, I love hot fruit and it is even better with cream or ice cream, if you aren’t dairy intolerant!

This recipe is based on one from Marguerite Patten’s Every Day Cook Book, first published in 1968. I like her recipes as she didn’t use loads of different ingredients and they were all store cupboard staples, so no need to do any special shopping for fancy stuff, which you often have to do with more modern recipes.

I had one pineapple ring left over from the tin, which I couldn’t manage to fit into the cake base. I haven’t tried any other types of fruit but obviously you could try tinned apricots, peaches or whatever you fancy.

Jigsaw time

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For me winter is jigsaw time, so over the Christmas holidays I completed my first jigsaw of the year. At times I almost gave up on this one as sometimes I sat there for over an hour and only placed a few pieces of the puzzle. It’s the most difficult jigsaw that I’ve ever done. It’s an ArtPiece Puzzle made by Pomegranate. It’s the first one I’ve done by that maker and I have to say that the pieces fit together so tightly that you can actually lift the whole thing up off the table, with no fear of any pieces falling out, it’s a solid sheet. Sadly the colours haven’t come out quite as well as I had hope they would in the photograph below.

A Pomegranate Jigsaw

It’s called Plum and Peach Bloom by the American artist Gustave Baumann, although I didn’t realise he was American at first, well look at the name! he was born in Germany and went to America when he was ten years old apparently. When I first saw it I thought it was a puzzle made from something painted by the Swedish artist Carl Larsson, they have quite similar styles I think.

The peach and plum tree blossom just about did me in, but as ever it was really satisfying when I placed the last piece into it.

You can see more images of Gustave Baumann’s work here if you’re interested.

I really like his work, he seems to have been keen on painting woodland areas, and as I love trees, that’s fine by me.

On a completely different subject – we haven’t been anywhere interesting over the last couple of months, mainly because it has hardly stopped raining. But Jack has done a post on Bladon which we visited during the summer. If you want to see what Churchill’s resting place looks like, you can see it here.

A Painted Smile by Frances Fyfield

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A Painted Smile by Frances Fyfield was published in 2015 and when I saw it on the ‘new books’ shelf of a local library I thought I would give it a go, despite never having read or even heard of the author. Mind you I don’t know how I’ve missed seeing her books as she has written a lot, and has several different series on the go. This one is from her Diana Porteous series.

I have to say that although I slogged to the end of the book I can’t say that I enjoyed it, although it is well written. It suffers from having absolutely no likeable characters, as far as I’m concerned anyway, and the plot was thin and uninteresting.

The setting is the art world, Diana Porteous is a young widow who has inherited a lot of art works from her elderly wealthy husband, as well as his property. His daughter is incensed at this because she feels that Diana has stolen her inheritance. Diana has had a history of thieving, in fact she got to know her husband because she was stealing from him. There are lots of thieves in the book, but somehow it all adds up to a pretty boring read. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has read anything by Frances Fyfield, and what they thought of them.

The blurb on the front from Literary Review says: ‘Elegant, original and subtle’

I suspect that the damning word there is subtle.

Another Golden World

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We were at the Edinburgh Art Fair last month, just before that bridge was closed for repairs, and I didn’t really intend to buy anything, we were just going to have a wee keek at what was on show. But I fell in love with some etchings by Kit Boyd who hand- tints his etchings using inks. Jack said I could have one for my Christmas present, and I couldn’t resist the one below. It’s called Another Golden World. Sorry about the flash.

Another Golden World

The artist is Kit Boyd and his artworks are set in a fantasy world. He follows in the British Romantic tradition of Samuel Palmer and the Neo-Romantics of the 1940s.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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I must admit that I’m one of those thrawn (pig-headed) people who don’t like to follow the crowd and read something just because everyone else has their nose in it – that GREY book would never darken my home. So when I noticed that the front of A Man Called Ove has written at the top of it – THE MILLION-COPY BEST SELLER – it put me off reading it. Peggy Ann had loved it which is why I requested it from the library so I thanked Sandra in the library and gathered it up wondering if I had wasted her time in getting it for me. The ‘WARM, FUNNY… UNBEARABLY MOVING’ from The Daily Mail!!! was a right off put-er too.

But heigh-ho Peggy was right, I loved this one too and I read it in two sittings, so as it has 294 pages I think it’s safe to say that I found it to be a real page turner.

Ove has recently been made redundant at the age of 59. He has lived in the same house for almost four decades and he’s one of those men who is a stickler for the rules. If a sign says no parking then he is determined that nobody will park in that area. He takes it upon himself to police the area he lives in, checking everywhere for signs of burglary. He had been head of the residents association until he was ousted in what he calls a coup d’etat. So he’s definitely a paid up member of the awkward squad and more than a wee bit odd, but at the bottom of everything he’s a man of principle with a very strong moral compass, and he thinks that if everyone was like him then things would be fine. He also has a heart of gold in that ageing body of his.

Close to the beginning of the book Ove decides that he now has no reason to keep on living, fortunately he isn’t very successful at trying to do away with himself which is just as well as he ends up being the mainstay of his community.

Despite being really tragic in parts this is also a fun read. Ove is a very grumpy and rude older man. (I have to be careful here as he’s actually younger than Jack!) and like many older people Ove thinks that modern life is rubbish and the younger generation know nothing, and it’s fair to say that the younger people have a similar attitude to the oldies. This was a great reading kick-off to 2016 and I gave it five stars on Goodreads, quite rare for me.

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

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sisters by a river

I’m still catching up with writing about some 2015 books, this one was the last book I read last year.

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns was first published in 1947 but I read a Virago reprint. If you’ve read about the Mitford sisters and their upbringing then this one will seem very familiar to you. But that is no bad thing, it’s just very autobiographical apparently and Comyns and the Mitfords had a lot of things in common, such as lots of sisters, a large property but lack of cash and parents who were nutty or I suppose I should say eccentric given the class structure. It’s definitely another case of – if that family had been poor and working class then they would have been taken into care. Having said that, I really enjoyed this book.

The tale is told by one of five sisters, her spelling is less than perfect which is a wee bit annoying at the beginning, but I got used to it. One child is not mentioned beyond the fact that they would hate to appear in the book, so they don’t, presumably that one was a boy. The setting is the banks of the River Avon and a large house called Bell Court which eventually contains five sisters.

After she had six babies at eighteen monthly intervals Mammy suddenly went deaf, perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn’t bear the noise of babies any more. …

Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind, all little bits and pieces held together by whisps, now she grew vaguer still and talked with a high floating voice, leaving her sentances half finished or with a wave of her hand she would add an ‘and so forth’. She was taken to several specialists but they could do nothing, one good thing being deaf stopped her having more babies, she was only twenty seven and might have had masses more, somehow being deaf put a stop to them.

Every cloud has a silver lining I suppose!

This is a witty and amusing read, although towards the end it takes a more tragic turn.

Happy New Year

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Happy New Year to everyone who visits this wee blog of mine. The past year hasn’t been a wonderful one globally, so let’s all keep our fingers crossed that 2016 will be better.

Due to unforeseen circumstances I haven’t been able to get around to writing about all the books I’ve read in 2015, and I had been intending to do a Read Scotland 2015 roundup before the end of the year. I hope to catch up early on in the New Year.

This year I read well over 100 books, but lots of them were from the local libraries, we were boosting their borrower numbers in an effort to stop the local council closing them, mind you they were all books that I would have got around to reading at some point, and I only cheated a couple of times and just took out a book with no real intention of reading it. But the decision to close had been made before there was even a council vote on the subject so it was all to no avail.

Anyway, in 2016 I plan to concentrate more on my own unread books, aiming to get through at least 50 of them and hopefully even more than that. I’m hoping to do some more cookery blogposts. I had planned to have a regular Foodie Friday post but that idea went to hell almost as soon as I thought of it, mainly because I didn’t get around to doing much baking, and also what I did do didn’t turn out that well. Maybe a ‘guess what it’s meant to be’ photo would be quite entertaining though! As Jack often says in those circumstances – It’ll be good with custard!