Cake eighteen

Gingerbread  Decorations

Does it ever happen to you to do something the others consider useless? Something you like which isn’t of great importance, of course,  you think it can really make the difference and what's more it’s fun for you? It does to me... and this is one example!

  I do love all Christmas decorations including the ones for the table, I think they help you feel the magic of Christmas. I like my table to look special and not only for the food we eat. This year I've made some gingerbread cookies and decorated the lamp over the table - a kind of Christmas Night scene with trees, snow flakes, reindeers, stars and, of course, Santa Claus and his sleigh - the Xmas tree and the front door wreath. It took me some time but, in the end, I was well satisfied. 

Song: Happy Christmas 
No better tune for Christmas time...

see recipe:
http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2013/01/cake-eighteen-gingerbread-decorations.html

Cake seventeen

Christmas Fruit Cake

There are mixed feelings about Christmas and some of us don’t like  it for several reasons. I can see their point but I personally love it! I think there’s some kind of magic in it which, unconsciously, takes you back to the fancy world of your childhood and you shouldn’t loose. I love everything about Xmas, from the preparations for Xmas Day to the lightings in towns. 

I like to decorate my house, to buy and put up my Xmas tree and make the crib with the help of my children even though they’re grown up now. I like the smell of a real tree, of the wet moss in the crib and of the gingerbread cookies decorations. I might be a dreamer but I believe it’s a time we all stop for a while and consider our family bondings and real values. 

It’s also my favourite time for baking as I can set my fancy free. 

I start well in advance, mid November making the Xmas Fruit Cake and an Advent Chocolate Calendar and then continue until Christmas making Father Xmas House, cookies and cookie decorations.

Song: Happy Christmas 

Xmas Day’s over but I think it’s always time to wish each other a Merry Xmas, a message of peace and love

see recipe:
http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/12/cake-seventeen-christmas-fruit-cake.html

Cake sixteen

Prince Charming 

It’s a cake I’m particularly fond of which takes me back to a time in the early 80’s when I was in Germany and had met my ‘Prince Charming’. A person from another culture, who taught me a lot about tolerance, political commitment and real love. Some of his words have been of great help over the years. I haven't seen him since then and won't see him again as he passed away some years ago. So I've named this simple though delicate cake in his honour.

It’s what the German call ‘Streusel Kuchen’ and I had first had it at that time. I don’t know why but I've kind of forgotten it for long! I only made it for the first time a few years ago when my elder son showed me a photo of a special cake he had eaten in Germany and wanted me to bake it for him. There it was again!

I found the recipe in an old German cookbook: it was 'love at first sight' for all our family.

Song: ‘In my life’

We all have a place we remember all our lives

see recipe:
http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/11/cake-sixteen-prince-charming-fruit.html

Cake fifteen

Early Autumn Cheesecake

Fruitcakes are mostly seasonal even though we may find nearly all fruits the whole year round. Personally I don’t like eating oranges in the middle of the Summer or peaches in Winter, it might be a matter of habit but I think it’s more a matter of colours and psychological influence. Bright colours like the red of strawberries, the yellow of peaches and apricots, the purple of plums or of wild berries are more Summer colours, or colours we associate with warm countries. We also use them for clothes or home accessories in the warm season. Then suddenly when the colder months come, we prefer paler colours or all the shades of orange; so here come grapes at the end of the Summer, pears, persimmons and finally oranges.

So this cake sounds for me like the end of the Summer, when days are still warm but much shorter and pave the way to Autumn: yellow for the grapes, pale brown for the meringue and white for the cheese. 

Do I have overanalyzed it all? Maybe there’s nothing more to intend than what it actually is!

Song: A glass onion

Do we always have to look for deeper messages, can’t we simply accept reality as it is?

for the recipe follow me on: http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/11/cake-fifteen-early-autumn-cheesecake.html

Cake fourteen

Scary Halloween

Today’s Halloween and it’s practically celebrated worldwide. It wasn’t so when I was young and I still find it rather difficult to accept Halloween parties, pumpkins and scary cookies outside the English speaking countries.. I know for sure, it’s  a problem of generation gap! In fact my children and especially my 17-year-old daughter love it and have loved it since they were young kids. I’ve made pumpkin-shaped cookies or pizzas with them and I thought it was already much... I’d have never gone so far as to make a tomb-like cupcake with an arm coming out of a grave! This is what my younger daughter made yesterday and, most incredibly, I helped her to realize! We really do things for our children we’d never ever have done ourselves! 

At first I was kind of disgusted making the tomb or the dead arm, but after a while I must admit I was having fun..... It’s all a matter of a different perspective, I was used to seeing a graveyard as a scary place to avoid while younger people love horror stories with vampires and walking dead. I’ve come to understand it’s only a way to handle the fear for monsters and ghosts and to keep them away, which is in line with the ancient Celtic tradition, isn’t it? 

Song: Eleonor Rigby

Talking about tombs and graveyards, have you ever heard of Eleonor Rigby's sad story?

for the recipe follow me on:
http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/11/cake-fourteen-scary-halloween.html

Cake thirteen

A Flowerbed

I love flowers and mostly love their colours. I love them in the wild, like in the endless fields of daffodils in Cornwall or of heather in Scotland. But I also like them all mixed up in flowerbeds, when you can create your own design and colour effect playing with different flower species.. 

In one of my next lives I might be a gardener, something like Laura or Rosemary in the British Tv series ‘Rosemary and Thyme’, without crimes of course, I’m not the type for them!

For the time being I can only make my balconies and windowsills look like small oasis of colour in a dull white-plastered block of flats. My family knows and complains a lot when I’m away and it’s their turn to water the flowers....

Some weeks ago it was my birthday and I had the nicest start of the day I could think of: a bed of flower cupcakes on my breakfast table!!! My two daughters had secretly made some splendid cupcakes with fondant flowers for me: white anemonies to be more precise, my favourite flowers! Very sweet of them, isn't it?

What did I do? I closed my eyes, took them by the hand and took them for a walk along our 'Cupcake Park', where nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout...

Song: Strawberry Fields Forever

Come, join us and let’s all go down where nothing’s to get hungabout!

for the recipe follow me on:
http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/11/cake-thirteen-flowerbed_2.html

Cake twelve

A solitary penguin 

Penguins don’t like to live alone, they live in groups and have friends and family. They’re very much like ourselves, aren’t they? Like me, for sure! I love my independence but I couldn’t live alone. It doesn’t matter to live under the same roof, it’s a matter of psychological closeness: you feel close to your family wherever you all are. 

It does help to be altogether though... and join our forces! I’d have never dared to make this fondant penguin unless my younger daughter had insisted. She wanted to make it for her best friend’s birthday: I was kind of scared of making fondant I was quite sure it’d have been a disaster..... but she was right! We made it and I felt like one! I can be her, she can be me, we all can be the penguin! 

By the way, anybody want to adopt this solitary penguin on a rocky island?

Song: “Im the walrus’ 

Who are we? We’re not only ourselves but ‘there’s a bit of us in one another

for the recipe follow me on:

http://time-for-cake-making.blogspot.it/2012/11/cake-twelve-solitary-penguin_2.html

Wanna see the recipe?