Islay finds, makes and bakes...

The cake of Christmas Past

We have a family Christmas cake recipe that I make most years. It was passed down from at least my great grandmother, and I normally make one for whichever bit of the family we're spending the holidays with (there are a lot of bits of family - both Adam's and my parents are divorced and remarried, before you even get started on the next layer of family). However, this year we're mainly staying at home (although we're seeing a lot of family members over the festive period), and I didn't really want to bake a heavy traditional cake to have kicking around here, so there hasn't been one.

I'm a bit sad, I love decorating the cake. Or, in the case of the one above (apparently from 2008. I have no memory of what I did last year), cajoling my sister to help me decorate. However, I'm philosophical, and I'm looking at this as an opportunity to try something new. I made this one (with a few modifications, including extra marmalade and more spice) recently for my birthday last week, and it was really yummy. I'm also tempted by Nigella's chocolate fruit cake, which doesn't seem to be on her website, but I think appears in a couple of her books. Or maybe I'll just make a few dozen batches of cookies and we'll survive on them...

Bake day

 

This baking project was as solo as I could make it for Teddy. His (no pressure, but he attempted them all, I think) tasks included:

1. Spooning out the ingredients into the weighing scales
2. Mixing them (with maybe a little help from the Kenwood Chef)
3. Rolling the dough (I had to do most of this to prevent inch thick biscuits)
4. Cutting shapes
5. Mixing icing
6. Decorating!

I've started really trying to make a conscious effort to leave Teddy to it a bit more when we're baking/crafting etc. The control freak in me wants to leap in every five seconds and do it my way (I had to really restrain myself when the sprinkles and silver balls were all mixed in one cup after carefully laying them out separately), but Teddy is so much happier if I just show him which step comes next, then only assist if necessary (like rolling out the biscuit dough so the cutter would actually go through it). The same seems to apply to things like painting and playdough, where I am trying to move on from him watching me play (something he did a lot as a smaller baby) to actually getting involved himself.

I have to say, I'm loving it. I feel I'm really growing into this mothering thing now Teddy is getting a bit older and more involved in everything we do (as I may have mentioned a few thousand times before, the whole helpless-baby-sleep-deprived-mother is all a little lost on me). I'm kind of hoping that I'll cope a little better (ahem) with number two baby as I'll be too busy trying to keep two small people alive and entertained throughout the day to break down in non-coping-hysterics too often.

Incidentally, it's taken me the best part of a day to produce this blog post. Our lovely shiny iMac is at the computer doctor's having a faulty card reader fixed, so I'm limited to my decade old (I do not exaggerate here. Macs go on for a long time) laptop, which is, admittedly, a teeny weeny bit slow. Ho hum.