Little rituals

I’ve found that one way of coping with lock-down is to develop a few little daily rituals that mark the various stages of the day. I think a lot of us suddenly have a lot more time than usual on our hands. We’re also driven to appreciate the small things in life, because life has contracted to the precincts of our own homes for many of us.

While we all wish, for many reasons, that things weren’t as they currently are in the world, there is something to be said for appreciating things that are right in front of us. For me, developing a few daily rituals connected to these small things has been a way of seeing some positives in the situation. I’m naturally an optimist, so I always tend to look for the good!

So here are some of the things I’ve started doing on a day to day basis that have helped to lift our lock-in time:

1. Early morning garden visits

I’m definitely a morning person, so getting up early has never been difficult for me. Usually I’m rushing off to work without even having breakfast, but lately, as I’ve been working from home, and as the weather has been so nice, I’ve started popping out to the garden in between breakfast and starting work in the mornings. I just head out and stand there for about 10 minutes, checking on the progress of the plants and generally enjoying the early morning light, quiet and freshness.

2. Mid-morning coffee

My working days when I’m physically at work can be quite busy, often with unexpected inquiries popping up throughout the day. In many ways, I thrive on that. However working at home does mean that my working day is slightly more predictable, allowing me to schedule in time for coffee and a biscuit (just for 10 minutes) at around 11am. It’s important to take regular screen breaks, something which I’m guilty of neglecting normally. I know it’s just a cup of coffee, but I really look forward to that mid-morning break.

3. Drawing the curtains

Ok, this one really is a bit bonkers. Ordinarily, we don’t much bother with drawing the curtains in our flat. Only one of our rooms faces out on the street, and we usually draw those curtains, and of course our bedroom curtains before going to sleep each night. In the last few days I’ve taken to going around the flat and drawing all the curtains, including the rooms which face out on to gardens etc. I don’t know why, but doing this makes me really happy. I think it’s something to do with sealing off our private domain for the night, and a way of marking the end of another day.

4. Cake of the week

Like many people, regular baking has become a way to pass the time in lock-down. I’ve heard that a surge in home-baking during lock down has resulted in shortages of flour and other basics here in the UK. I certainly struggled to stock up on baking necesseties for a while a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully we’ve been able to get our mitts on some flour now, so it’s cake-ahoy. So far we’ve had fruit cake twice, Simnel (in honour of Easter) and Victoria Sponge. I’m thinking of doing scones and maybe cinnamon whirls this weekend.

5. TV time

A lot of people find this odd, but I actually don’t watch TV. At all really. My other half and I are big film fans, so at weekends we usually curl up together on the sofa with rented films. Don’t get me wrong, I do have TV shows that I love, but I don’t actually watch them on TV. I tend to stream or buy blu-rays and then watch at my convenience. Somehow the thought of having to be in front of the TV at the same time each week to watch something that’s scheduled to air seems like way too much commitment for me. So I’ve always squeezed my TV watching into Sunday afternoons. Working from home and skipping the commute however means that I have about an hour free between the end of my working day and the time when I normally start making our evening meal. So I’ve started fitting in an hour of whatever show I am working my way through in that time. I found it weirdly comforting to be able to sit and watch and old BBC period drama in that hour, especially in the first couple of weeks of lock-down. I’d go so far as to say it was the only time during the day when I felt ‘normal’, probably because watching an old drama brought back memories of our old ‘normal’.

How are you coping with lock-down and have you developed any little rituals of your own?

Baking notes: Coffee & Walnut cake

So coffee and walnut cake was the bake of this week!

It came out pretty well, but once again the baking time was waay longer than it said in the recipe – another 20 minutes on top of the 40 it was supposed to have, so an hour in total.

I’m also a little unsure about the icing. The icing in the recipe was a cream cheese icing rather than a traditional buttercream. I don’t quite get the idea of cream cheese icing for coffee and walnut cake. I think it’s fine with carrot cake – I’m used to having it then. But with coffee and walnut, I think you want a proper coffee flavoured icing too. The recipe for the icing basically instructed you to beat a lot of cream cheese with some sugar. I did this, and then also attempted to add some coffee flavouring by mixing a little instant coffee with some water and then adding that to the mix. I can’t say it really added any flavour. Neither did the sugar specified in the recipe to be honest. The icing just tasted like cream cheese which just seems odd to me. Next time I’ll be doing the more traditional buttercream, coffee flavoured finish!

Baking notes: Peanut butter brownies

More baking has taken place. I’m gearing up for a party you see. We have a BBQ coming up towards the end of July for S’s birthday. We did this last year and it was great fun. Without thinking much of it, last year I made brownies and a Victoria sponge cake as deserts. They rather unexpectedly went down a storm. Being the people-pleaser that I am, this has actually made me feel pressured to top or at least equal my baking effort this year.

So, I’ve been trying to work out a good way of doing peanut butter brownies. I’ve seen various recipes on the web, but to be honest they all sound like a bit of a faff to me, and I hate faff. I don’t think I’ve seen any that don’t involve doing things like taking brownies out of the oven part way through cooking to smear peanut butter on top and then putting them back – how does that work?!

After a fair bit of mulling it over, I decided to just have a bash at adapting the recipe for plain brownies that I normally used. All I did was whack about 200g of crunchy peanut butter into the pan along with the usual chocolate and butter, allowing it all to melt before mixing with eggs and flour.

Once the brownies were cooked I did attempt a kind of peanut topping by putting some peanut butter on top and then putting the brownies back in the over for another 10 minutes.

I didn’t exactly get it right I don’t think. The result isn’t bad. It doesn’t taste bad – in fact it tastes of peanut butter and chocolate (no surprises there then). But I think next time I need to remember the following:

• It will probably work better not to melt the peanut butter completely. I might try stirring it into the mixture after the chocolate has been melted and added to the flour and eggs, rather than putting it in the pan with the chocolate.
• Allow extra cooking time because of the additional amount of mixture made by adding the peanut butter. Or possibly substitute some of the chocolate for the peanut butter
• Topping…well actually I’m still not sure what the best way is for that…any ideas?

 

Baking notes: Lemon drizzle cake

When I get the chance (which is not very often sadly) I like to do a little bit of baking. I usually keep it pretty simple. I have a small repertoire of tried and tested favourites that I come back to over an over – chocolate brownies, Victoria Sponge, sultana scones, cupcakes – that sort of thing.

I have a bit of a battle with my oven when baking large cakes. Quite often I’ll find that the top of the cake cooks before the middle does, and it seems to take a loooong time for things to cook all the way through, meaning that I have to put foil over the cake to stop the top burning before the middle is cooked!

This weekend, as we had S’s parents visiting us on Sunday I thought I’d break out the hand whisk and have a go at a lemon drizzle cake. Happily, it came out pretty near perfect! No idea what I did right this time really – I used the same recipe as last time, but the cake seemed to cook much more quickly and evenly. Possibly I had the oven shelf higher up, though you’d think that would make it cook more quickly on the outside only. It might also have been that I used a slightly bigger tin – but then I only have 2 rectangular cake tins, and I think they’re pretty much the same size. The only thing I know for sure that I did differently this time is to use self raising flour instead of plain flour and baking powder.

Well, whatever it was it worked. So my small notes to myself for next time I bake this are:

• Use self-raising flour
• Place cake on top shelf of oven
• Bake for 45 minutes then use kitchen foil to cover the top of the cake
• Bake for a further 15 minutes until done

I don’t know if this will be any use to anyone else, but I hope it might be – if nothing else hopefully next time I try this cake I’ll remember to look back at this post. Putting foil over the top of the cake to stop it burning has to be my biggest baking tip – do you have any baking tips or tricks that always work for you?

p.s. the recipe I used is from this book – British Baking by Oliver Peyton