Eating the cake.

Not always but much of the time I make a cake to pop into the cake tin, especially when the grandchildren are visiting but also just for us. Knowing we have some damson jam I decided to make a Victoria sponge, usual imperial measurement of  6+6+6 for butter, sugar and flour. I had a blank for which gas mark to use, daft really I’ve been making these sponges since I was about 11 years old, have used gas, Fahrenheit and centigrade and gas again since then.  Of course I consulted ‘Aunty’ Delia as she’s known at Pixie Towers, whilst doing so noticed her recipe for a sponge using the all-in-one method. In the heat the  butter was very soft, she recommends soft margarine but we don’t buy margarine, also the new fancy pants kitchen scales meant I could weigh the ingredients straight into the mixing bowl, I so love the revert to zero button for this. The extra magic ingredient was baking powder added to the self raising flour, wow, what a difference it made, the cake is so light and rose so much more. No more creaming method, this was so much lighter. Delia’s recipe was 4+4+4 so I upped it to usual 6 ounces to fit the tins.


Now can anyone tell me why the media is using the word “decades” instead of say 10 years or 20 years? ITN uses imperial measurement still, BBC has reports in metric, most annoying I can visualise  miles but am confused by kilometres. I accept in Europe distances are metric, here it was my understanding that miles and pints were to be retained. The milkman delivers still in glass pint bottles.

Now a coincidence that amused me, today I was working at our Local Studies, the photographs I was indexing were from the Richmond & Twickenham Times for Friday 13th August 1971. I’m blogging this exactly 48 years later yet so many of the reports were topical, including one on environmental issues from The Ecology journal. The quality of the microfilm for the issue was too poor to photograph this.