MoFo Day Eight: Two Cakes In One.

Well, it's Yom Kippur and since our family has a Jewish heritage, we are fasting today. Yesterday, after doing about a year's worth of cutting and pasting, letter and number recognition, drawing, tracing, counting and colouring from his big 'Learning at Home' workbook from the U.S. (he just wouldn't stop!), Mouse, 4, suddenly announced that he wanted to bake a chocolate cake, right there and then. It was bedtime by then, so we managed to get him to agree to rolling over the cake project until today. The result was that I scored good mummy points by cooking with the children, but not so many Jewish points because of having a lapse in concentration and dipping my finger in the cake mix to try it.. The other thing I forgot was that Pony doesn't like chocolate cake (how is that even possible.?) so, after a lot of flapping about, it transpired that Pony was happy to help make a chocolate cake as she still had a vanilla cupcake in the freezer which she could eat while everyone else ate chocolate cake, later. Every now and then we make a batch of vanilla cupcakes for Pony to eat if she doesn't like some other treat that has been baked. We tend to use one of  Isa's cupcake recipes, or a heavily veganised recipe which may still belong to Nigella Lawson, or, by now, our best friend Paula (of soon-to-be-cult-blog Purple Cricket..)..I don't really know what the rules are about these things..you decide!

   We're planning to make a chocolate cake and putting in a mixture of frozen raspberries, blackberries, currants and cherries, pouring the cake  batter over the fruit before cooking which makes a lovely moist, juicy cake. There were strawberries in the frozen fruit as well, but I picked them out as I think they would just turn to mush.
  Today I hit on what seemed like the perfect solution: I split the ingredients in half and poured half of the batter into each side of the cake tin. We only put the fruit in the chocolate half because Pony apparently doesn't like raspberries, blackberries, currants or cherries. Except that when I did that, she changed her mind and decided that she did, after all, want some fruit in her half- just two berries..
   I'm not at all sure this is going to work because I was fairly relaxed about the process of dividing up the ingredients, so the two batters have worked out quite different in consistency, so may require different cooking times.. I've made marble cake lots of times before, cakes and cupcakes, and they've always worked ok, but the different mixes were more swirled together,not in two distinct halves as in this case, where different thicknesses of batter may matter more..We'll see.
  Oh no! We just had a powercut! The cake had only been in the oven for about five minutes- that's not likely to help matters, is it?
  I don't LOVE cake, but there is something magical about them- I love it that we now have an oven with a window in the door- not had one of those before- so you can watch cakes and bread rising- it's better than TV- except the first series of 'Mad Men', of course! The oven was a secondhand (pre-loved!) bargain from eBay; it's been great, with the window and everything, except that, being secondhand,we didn't get a manual with it. Never really worried about that- I mean, it's an oven, how complicated can it be..? Well,actually, the answer to that is QUITE complicated, when there's a power cut! Even when you get the power back, the clock isn't working,just flashing a row of zeros. The stupid oven doesn't work if the clock isn't working (logic?), so, with our poor vulnerable sponge shrouded in silent, rapidly cooling darkness inside the oven, we were frantically trying to GUESS how to re-set the clock. In the end, Miranda managed it, but doesn't know how she did it, so although she may have saved the cake, that's no help at all for the future..
  There was a picture of a chocolate cake in a book we had as children- it was a Babar the Elephant book and it had a page showing the Old Lady making a chocolate cake; I always loved the picture.
  I've just got the cake out of the oven and it looks great! When I make a chocolate cake I often just sprinkle it with a bit of icing sugar which looks lovely in contrast to the cake, or ice it and stick 'smarties' on it (we sell them in our dear little 100% vegan shop VegaNation but I'm not going to do that with this one as I think it looks nice as it is. So, vanilla sponge for Pony; chocolate cake with raspberries, cherries and blackberries for the rest of us!