Favourite Recipes

I bought a recipe notebook today, it's pretty and has a button to keep it closed, and a pencil and holder. I've already put my most favouritest cake recipes in it, and the icing recipes that I keep losing. Now all I need to do is find the OTHER recipes that I use most (they're on little cards, somewhere...) and get them written up. And then find my other recipe notebook which is in the attic somewhere. Which has things like korvapuusti and kahvikehrat and moussaka and various other goodies that I've collected over the years.

Anyway.

This is the ginger cake that I made today. It came from a (supposed) parkin recipe, but the recipe didn't mention oats or oatmeal or treacle or molasses or anything like that: it's a lovely ginger cake though! Just not nearly dark enough or sticky enough to be anywhere close to the parkin of my childhood, which stuck to your fingers and you pretty much had to scrape it off with your teeth.

I remember bonfire night at my primary school and I remember the year when my youngest brother had grown up and started secondary school and we no longer had an excuse to go to that bonfire night. I remember going one year when I was much bigger (I don't remember the reason any more) and marvelling at how SMALL the loos were. Was I really ever that small?! Evidently. It was most odd. The corridors were longer when I went to school there, I'm sure of it. I managed to get disorientated and a bit lost because everywhere was closer together than I remembered it.

It is funny how your perspective changes as you grow bigger, and the world gets that little bit smaller. And it's incredible how a whole load of memories of bonfire nights have just come flooding back... I hope that Ben grows up with a load of good memories that can just come flooding back with a trigger like parkin.



In Ben news, we have re-discovered a magic bedtime aid.

Stories!

They are, at the moment, the perfect antidote to the bonkersness that prevents Ben from settling down and going to sleep. They capture his imagination, he helps read them with me (by providing appropriate sound effects, mainly), and by the time we've got through a couple of stories, all bonkersness has dissipated and he is ready to go to sleep. It's wonderful. Coupled with the clocks changing, it has meant my evenings have been reclaimed. It's pretty wonderful :)