Freezer brag and upcoming days

 Yesterday I did it. Emptied the chest freezer, de-iced it my way. I never do that open the drain, catch the water thing. I just chip gently then finally lever huge sheets off using a spatula. It's very pleasing.

And the result is in fact a lot more room inside there.

This situation was helped by making several bags of stock material and reducing them to stock ready for soup

 Likewise the fridge freezer. I seem to have found a lot of outdated items. I did keep one container of dye, black walnut, because the nuts are much less plentiful at the moment.

I found one new situation, about making yogurt. The old fridge ran very warm on top, perfect for proofing bread and making yogurt. The new one works better, and the top is cool. Not good for yogurt 

The stove is electronic ignition, no pilot light. The stove light is led, doesn't emit heat. Oh. So I set the stove at its lowest temp 170°f, a bit high for leaving  all night, set the yogurt jar wrapped in its usual emergency blanket, turned off the stove after a couple of hours, left it shut all night. And this morning I got pretty good yogurt. 

All this is displacement activity because tomorrow is a doubly significant day. Handsome Son's birthday and Handsome Partner's twelfth anniversary.  

We celebrated HP on his birthday in June, so whenever Handsome Son is free, he'll let me know, we'll celebrate his birthday. I did a chocolate cherry cake for HP, so I won't repeat. I think a plum crumble is the plan.

 I'll bake it today and it will freeze till needed. 

A handmade card, a hand signed check (!) his usual birthday gift, and I think he'll be happy. He's getting to the age where you're less thrilled about each successive birthday, I notice.

This morning recalls to me the long ago final ob visit, where he declared at least a week to go, baby's head not engaged or even close. Yeah. Water broke that evening, sudden emergency situation, nemmind the details, but nobody got any sleep that night. 

We all survived to tell the tale, though I was too weak to hold my baby, couldn't lift my arms. The nurse held him to me instead. He was fine! So happy though, such a rush to meet this lovely little boy who'd been kicking my ribs mercilessly for months.  Starting as hyper as he went on! Fittest member of the family. 

Happy day, everyone, especially August birthday people, you Leos! Here's birthday flowers for you

Farm food and me, perfect together, and rehoming succulents

Today was about the first farm tomatoes, and peaches, great lunch.  With homegrown basil cut up and strewn around, olive oil spritzed on,  and tuna salad, made with tartare sauce.  

Pinch of baharat on the peach.  

And this was a lunch for a queen.

After I'd picked the basil, I looked back and there was a female goldfinch noshing on the seeds.  I let my herbs go to flower and seed, because I usually have all I need off them already.  And the flowers are often lovely.  

Then the seeds come in handy for roving bands of goldfinches.  I already saved all the basil seeds I need, so I can start seed next year.  I'll leave the rest for the goldfinches, our state bird, dropping in numbers because of habitat loss, least  I can do, really.

At the libe this morning I picked up a book on moss gardens, and a chat with circ desk friends about succulents.  They're trying to rehab an old jade plant that sort of fell apart, so they didn't burst out laughing at my experiments.  Kindred spirits.

And home to look at the book which told me more than I wanted to know about moss, its care and feeding.  Turns out it's aJapanese book, should have known, great photography, extreme care with handling everything, many quizzes to qualify the reader to continue with the moss journey.  Not exactly for me, but it did trigger a nice thought, which, you know how it is, I put into action instantly.

Dug out a lovely old Vermont Pottery platter, greenish brownish glaze, friendly for plants, realized I had containers of glass pebbles and beach glass for a bed, and installed the Three Little Succulents in their pots in this posh new home.

So here they are in their new digs. 

The platter we bought, along with some other lovely pieces, on a trip we made 50 years ago, when I was about five months' pregnant with Handsome Son, whose birthday it is today.  There must have been a subconscious river of thought about this.  And about Handsome Partner whose sixth anniversary is also today, and with whom I picked out the pottery.

It's all good.

Mixed emotions, and Battenberg cake

On Friday Handsome Son is coming over to dinner, to celebrate his birthday, which in fact doesn't happen till the eighth.  Longtime readers may recall that Handsome Partner, after a long illness and nine years of caregiving, died on that day, quietly, at home. Son was alone with him just at that minute.  I'd left the room briefly. This often happens, I'm told, that the partner isn't there at the exact moment.

So that day is one of massive emotions in all directions.  We have marked HP's life on his own birthday in past years, so as to sort of reserve HS's birthday for himself.  But you can't ban the emotions that have to come with it.

Anyway, the dinner will be comfort food -- spaghetti with a lovely red sauce with hot Italian sausage and mushrooms, followed by a lifetime ambition of mine, Battenberg cake!

I have been going to bake one for maybe forty years, and finally got around to it.  So there's that.  I made it all from scratch, including the marzipan coat.  In fact marzipan's a lot easier to make than I had realized.

Here's the opening salvo, many ingredients.

However, I ran into technical difficulties with the cake.  Baking it was the least of my problems, though I had only two square pans both an inch bigger than the recipe wanted.  This is a problem with this kind of cake, which you have to sort of build and stack, and it's better if the slices are thick enough to work with you rather than against you..

So cake all beaten, and divided into two more or less equal parts, so you color one pink, and leave the other alone, the baking went fine, and the cake tastes okay.

However, the assembly, with a large cat prowling around and helping, was another story.  You slice up each cake, and build the slices checkerboard style, cementing them together with jam.  It starts to feel like kindergarten, where you give the kids edible stuff to build with in case anyone fancies tasting it.  And you have to sort of carpenter the slices so that there aren't thin ends.  Well, with the right size pans, there wouldn't have been thin ends, but oh well.

Once assembled, then reassembled after they fell apart, I painted all the outside with more jam as adhesive, and wrapped them in the marzipan.  I ground the almonds myself, since almond flour is wildly expensive, and has stabilizers and desiccators and who knows what else added to stop clumping.  So even the outside was a recipe unto itself.

It was one of those occasions when you have all the bowls and the rolling pin, which hardly ever gets used, and all the counter space, and various spoons and knives and measuring thingies, all over the place.

The good part is that this recipe makes two cakes, just as well considering how much work it takes to make it.  For some recipes you go through all this, divide one pan with parchment paper and put dough on each side, one colored, one plain, and after all that you have one small cake.

So here it is, and I offer it with the usual humble transparency of this blog, not fancied up by a food artist, just  presented by me.  Glad I did it, but it does look a bit Monty Python.  And I'm going to make a raspberry sauce to serve over the helpings on Friday.

However, this means I can do similar things with other recipes, too.  Bake one regular item, banana bread, maybe, slice and stack it and make it posher.  Not a bad idea.  Not sure I want to buy two right sized pans, though.

No idea why it's called Battenberg cake, though that was the Royals name before WW1 when they changed it to Mountbatten, talk about transparency, a three year old could see through that. 

My mom, no respecter of royalty, used to refer to the Queen now and then as Mrs. Guelph. And it was amazing what they learned, having left school at 12, what a grasp of history.  Because that was indeed the family name of the European dynasty she came from, long before they were kings and queens.

So I wonder if this cake is a dig at opportunistic name changes. or if a nice lady called Mrs. Battenberg got fed up of plain cake and thought she'd entertain the kids with a checkerboard one. 

and here's the cook's privilege: scraps of the cut-off cake bits and the extra marzipan, with afternoon tea. And it's worth making your own marzipan, much better than the shop stuff.

And I have a Battenberg cake in the freezer for emergencies when nothing else will do!