About

It’s hackneyed stuff now - turn a significant age and set a few challenges to prove there's still some life in the old girl. None of my challenges involved writing a blog about it. One of my challenges however was, over the course of a year, to bake 50 ‘cakes’ for my colleagues, and make every one a different recipe. It was never the intention to be 50 cakes as such, just 50 baked items - but it became my '50 cakes challenge'.

Perhaps the real challenge has been getting the baking from my kitchen on the south coast to my place of work in London - hence the blog name - but not everything has been subjected to the motorbike ride test. 

Baking progressed fitfully through the Autumn of 2011 - a few batches of biscuits and hardy baked goods like flapjacks negotiated the A3 - but it was interrupted for a few weeks while I visited family in the Antipodes. Blighty was in the clutches of Winter when I returned, and I bowed to (my age and) the voice of reason, resorting to a commute by train – cake tin clutched under my arm every Monday morning. 

The following recipes are a mix of inheritances from my mother and grandmothers, those basic things you are drilled on in primary school cooking class, gifts from friends, things clipped from calendars and magazines, and a few acquired from that wonderful resource – the internet.

It was when I arrived at N^o. 14, (a recipe of such meagre proportions that I decided to double it), that I choose to extend (for that week) the cake consuming opportunities to include the good folk at ‘Art in the Park’

Art in the Park

- a wonderful studio in Burgess park, London where I have the pleasure every Monday evening to chip away at some woodcarving project and socialize with other similarly motivated ‘chippers’ – and Cynthia. (Cynthia is a marvellous volunteer at the Art in the Park and Heart Garden establishment, cheerful, cheering, and full of enthusiasm and encouragement – just ‘not a carver of wood’.)  Art in the Park Website here



N^o.14 was consumed with enthusiasm, the recipe requested and the recipe duly delivered a week later along with a sample of N^o. 15 – consumed with equal enthusiasm.

This Blog came has come about simply through their encouragement. It had never been my intention, design or desire to blog about anything. I don’t use Facebook, or Tweet, and still write letters by hand with a fountain pen! (In fact this has been drafted long-hand, on the back of paper scrounged from the recycle bin, in moments snatched here and there – the current chapter composed lying on the Dojo floor waiting for my Aikido juniors to turn up for their class.)

By the way, I make no apology for the measurements throughout being in a mixture of metric and imperial. I am 'of an age' such that it is the way I grew up – using both. Both make sense to me but in truth my old-fashioned balancing scales only have imperial weights so I am adept at conversion.