one crutch down…

hold on to your cellulite people! i’m back in the kitchen!

i have started hobbling around on one crutch and am able to stand with almost equal weight distribution. YAY!!

the best part of loosing a crutch is that i now have a hand free. being handless while in motion is not cool.

so naturally, the first thing i did was take out some butter 🙂

i came across a recipe for vanilla bean buttermilk loaf with maple butter from holycrabness. my twin had brought back some maple syrup from canada so i was eager to play. also holycrabness pulls off some truly epic photography so that cake has been screaming at me for weeks now.

because i’m not fully functional on my feet at the moment i took the time to do all the ingredient prep before hand. it took me a long time to hobble around the kitchen but it made things less stressful when i started with the batter.

preparated!

i didn’t have any buttermilk so i went with a mix of 4/5ths double cream yogurt and 1/5th cream. no rhyme or reason.

i also used normal sugar instead of castor sugar.

eggs, butter, sugar

i beat the butter before adding the sugar and then the eggs one at a time. i then folded in the dry and wet ingredients in batches. i added the vanilla paste to the wet ingredients.

and fold…

the resulting batter was very dense (similar to the lamington cake batter). i used a spatula to even it out in the loaf tin before popping it in the oven. i baked mine for 50min at 170deg C.

hot spot

the sponge was still moist when i pulled it out the oven and i was happy with the colour and rise.

it’s been too long

i melted the butter and maple syrup together in a pot and let it bubble a bit. not sure if i got it gooey enough though. because we had to go out i ended up pouring the maple butter on a warm cake instead of letting it cool first as the recipe recommends.

bubble bubble

it was still delicious. i am so pleased with this sponge recipe that this will hence forth be my go-to recipe. i reminds me of a sponge cake that my grandmother used to bake. not very sweet but decadently yielding. bear scolded me but i had some for breakfast this morning. you can easily omit the maple butter.

mmmmmmm

this recipe has a 1:1 ratio of flour and sugar and 1.5:1 ratio of flour to butter. the buttermilk pound cake that i like to bake has a 1.66:1 flour to butter ratio. It also takes more egg. and notably the ratio of sugar to flour is 1.65:1.

i can’t tell you how pleased i am to be baking again. that was a long time to be in the wasteland of bought cake and woolies biscuits. i sound like such a ponce…again.

lessons learnt: ingredient ratios really make a big difference. baking is a good motivation for getting back on your feet…well for me anyway.