Cakes and tarts – Page 14 – Myfrenchkitchen

Here we are. Easter.

It is actually not about Easter bunnies and eggs and chickens. But to lighten the heaviness of “La Passion” a bit, we bring some pastel blues and pinks and yellows into our house, letting our children search for eggs behind trees and prop a chocolate egg ourselves into our cheeks.

So I also spent some playful time around the house and in the kitchen, using my good friend Karin’s microwave carrot cake to bake individual carrot loaves. It is SO moist and quick…I don’t know why I don’t bake it more often. Maybe because I’ll eat more often..?

I baked it in mini loaf pans(brown carton and silicone) and it took only about 8-10 minutes to bake. I also didn’t have cream cheese, so I used a soft goats cheese, which was as delicious, of not more delicious than cream cheese!

Suggestions:

Use the recipe and bake mini individual loaves or cakes.
Add some dried currants for variation.
Add a tsp of mixed spice along with the cinnamon.
Use soft goats cheese instead of cream cheese.
Bake in a glass pyrex bowl or in a microwave ring pan.

…bunnies in chocolate, young Prunus trees in blossom just before they go off to Coin Perdu next week to be planted in the garden. They are simply decorated in their black plant containers with old lace and some chocolate eggs and tiny glass vases with an Easter chicken feather…

.. a white wooden basket filled with anything and everything – an ostrich egg, some fresh moss from the garden, tulips, cute bunnies crawling all over, old lace, fresh eggs from the farm, a big heart and time that runs out quick…

…”will this work never end”…?

…peeping in the kitchen, or perhaps smelling the tulips?…

…”I knew I was good, but I never thought I was THIS good?”…

…a full tummy…

…le livre des mères parfaites by Alison Maloney…

(Fun extracts from what mothers tell their children…)

Mother: “If you swallow your chewing-gum, it will stay in your stomach for seven years!”

Fact: Chewing-gum, like any other food, will be in the digestive system for round about 20 hours.

I was in Paris the past week and unfortunately couldn’t get around to “les cupcakes de Chloe“. So on arriving home, I couldn’t wait to bake a cupcake to satisfy that lust for a sweet, icing topped helping. Of course mine isn’t even close to Chloe’s, but it is still delicious. I am done now. For quite some time.

While taking the metro to and fro(urgh) I made use of the time, staring at people, thinking and wondering about them. Making up stories about them. Scribbling notes and drawings in my notebook. Who they are, what they do, where they come from, their life stories. How they look. First impressions. Based on what we see and hear and feel.

A recipe from Cupcakes, cookies and macarons by Marabout chef.

Suggestions:

I prefer baking mini cupcakes, since the big ones are too much for one helping. And if you like a second, it still doesn’t make one full cupcake…leaving you with no guilt for this indulgement!
OR bake different sizes of cupcakes for an interest on the cake platter. In which case you will bake the different sizes at different times..the smaller the cupcake the quicker the baking time.
The cranberries can be left out.
Use lemon or lime juice and lemon zest instead of orange juice and zest.
Add a tablespoon of ricotta or mascarpone in the butter icing sugar
For lighter cupcakes, omit the butter icing sugar and simply sprinkle the cupcake with some sifted icing sugar.
Serve with fresh fruits like strawberries and a coulis, or caramelized orange slices and an orange coulis.

First impressions. That instinctive first thought or opinion about something or someone. How many times have you said just after meeting someone…”I like him, he seems nice”, or I don’t think I like her, there is just something about her…” A house, a school, a country, new neighbours, a restaurant… That first impression is something a “con artist” relies on to entrap his victims. It is that “thing” that makes you stare at a person walking into a room with a certain presence…that makes you keep quiet when a deep voice speaks on the other side of the room.

I have had an occasion where the vegetable man at the market asked me whether I’m a historian. On my surprised: “why?”, he pointed at my handbag and the pencil holding my hair up. To him, I had the look and manner of an historian, with my Indiana Jones leather bag and pencil in my hair(which I used to keep my hair from falling into my painting back at home..).

Another time we lived in SC and I used to visit Books a million close by early some mornings to get some drawing and writing done in a corner with a coffee. One day a woman approached me, sat down next to me and started chatting. I’ve seen her often as well as many other regulars, but they never approached me, thinking I was working with all the books and paper around me. It turned out that they all had their impression too…wondering who I was, where I was from, wondering about my foreign accent, my keeping to myself in a corner, my soft-spokennnes, ( I have a voice that just doesn’t carry!) Along with my dark hair and dark complexion, not fogetting the hereditary dark circles under my eyes, they decided I had to be Arabic.

Once I was reading a book in a coffee shop while waiting for Hartman to arrive at the station. At some stage I burst out laughing for some funniness in the book. A while later, a man sitting opposite me started speaking to me, fascinated by my laughing out loud all by myself, and asked me if I was a teacher revising a novel… I read with a pencil in hand, my reading glasses low on my nose and a little notebook on the side.

Hartman, in his university years, somewhat resembled a young Mick Jagger – very tall, very slender, sinewy, with thick long disorderly hair, constantly wearing his favourite thick old army coat, his grandfather’s hat and his guitar slung around his shouders. My mother trusted him nothing!! Today, much older and wearing black woolen coats and hats, Mick Jagger made way for a Francois Mitterrand strictness and formality, leaving some people with a slight apprehension to approach him.

First impressions. Truth…or deception…or a little bit of both…?