Category: cookbooks

Cook as I say, Not as I do

UnknownMany, many years ago a dear friend gave me Cook as I say, Not as I do.

I have never cooked anything from this (well, not yet) but I will never get rid of it. Partly because of its provenance and partly because it is just so funny; I really want to be able to share it with the young people in my life (ok, mostly girls, because the characters are mostly girls and it deals with girl issues).

There are eight separate chapters. Each chapter is a vignette of a daughter’s life, in correspondence with a maternal figure in her life. Sometimes the relationship is good, sometimes a bit wonky, sometimes non-existent. Sometimes the relationship is like Saffron and Edina in Absolutely Fabulous. Sullivan introduces the collection as being a set of found documents, “apparently abandoned by their original collector” – and while the found footage idea can sometime be a bit dubious, in this case of such domesticity I think it works.
Every double page has a letter from the mother-type on the left (very occasionally the daughter speaks back) – they’re in a wild variety of handwriting, and many of them go in for a species of guilting. The righthand side has a recipe of some sort, and these too reflect the mother’s personality: to whit:

Divide the raisin bran in half. If you had to share everything the way I did when I was young, this part will be easy.

I love it.

Swiss meringue buttercream

IMG_0836When Katherine, at the Sweetfest, mentioned that her swiss meringue buttercream recipe was from Martha Stewart, I wondered whether my Martha Stewart’s CAKES would have the recipe. And it did. And then we were invited to a friend’s house, and I had banana and walnut cake in the freezer already, and so… experiment! (Of course, it’s also online.)

Stewart’s version makes 9 cups’ worth and requires a swoon-worthy amount of eggs and sugar. So I’ve written the halved ingredients into the book itself, and then I realised that I only had 150g of butter anyway so I just figured out how much sugar and so on that required; the answer was 2 whites, and so on.

It’s a very straightforward process to make the frosting, happily. Yes there’s whisking of sugar and whites, but that didn’t take too long. The rest of the process was easy.

I didn’t flavour the buttercream aside from the vanilla, since it was going on a banana cake anyway. It was easy to spread onto the cake, which is an important thing for me. I had enough left over that I could have frosted the edges if I wanted, but decided that that would be a bit of overkill – especially when I discovered that the buttercream will last in the freezer for three months. So into a jar it goes. No idea where it will be used in the future.