Birthday baking bonanza

I awoke this morning with a very muggy head (it's still not terribly clear, so apologies if I begin to ramble), the result of a weekend of excess followed by a bracing mountain hike to redress the balance. No.3 Sister turned thirty on Friday and as she is the baby of the family, her arrival into proper grown-up territory required much celebrating and, needless to say, alot of baking.

 

It began on Friday morning with a basket of pretzels still warm from the oven, as requested by the birthday girl following the success of the trial batch earlier in June. For those of you looking for an update on the bicarbonate versus caustic soda bath for the pretzels, I confess that I haven't quite gathered the requisite courage to face the caustic version. An Austrian colleague of No.1 Sister assured her that she'd never heard of anyone using caustic soda and since I've had no complaints on the quality of the pretzel, for the moment I feel if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Besides, I still haven't purchased the necessary safety equipment (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!).

 

 

There was a brief interlude in the baking schedule when No.3 Sister high-tailed it down to Cork to hear The National play (lucky, lucky girl). Cinderella here stayed behind to make sure there was plenty of birthday cake for her return on Sunday afternoon. I planned to bake a Lemon meringue layer cake, sandwiched with cream and lemon curd, to be eaten after the birthday dinner. This was one of only three cakes approved by my extraordinarily fussy sister. She's not a huge cake fan, unless it's something very simple, classic and not very rich. As this cake incorporates two of her favourite things- sponge and meringue - it passes the test. Happily, it's also an impressive sight on the cake stand, birthday candles ablaze, and thus perfect for such a big celebration. The cake was delicious after the lovely dinner Mam made (a very tasty meatloaf with chickpea and tomato sauce), with the tangy lemon curd the ideal counterpoint to the sweetness of the meringue, the buttery, lemon sponge and the richness of the cream. The only complaint from around the table was that I should stop taking photos for my blog and just dish up the cake already (seriously, I barely escaped with my camera intact).

Although the cake plan was approved and in the works (the lemon curd was made in advance on Saturday), I felt there was a brownie-sized gap in the Sunday celebrations. We were all descending upon the parents early afternoon for coffee and a glass of bubbly to toast the birthday girl on her return and since the cake was for after dinner, later that evening, something else was required. As mentioned above, No.3 Sister has no love for decadent, rich, 'fancy' cakes (her word), so I turned to the 1970s All-Colour Hamlyn Cookbook, the go-to recipe book of our childhood, with all the family cake favourites on which I honed my skills. The chocolate brownie in this book is more cake-like than the dense, moist brownie more commonly found today and is not over-poweringly chocolatey (with cocoa rather than melted chocolate in the mixture) - so far so blah, I hear you say. What makes this brownie particularly special and more-ish though is the gooey, fudgy icing that is poured over the top and drips down over the sides. In theory, you could give the icing enough time to set before you cut the brownie into squares, so that there's no dripping and a neater finish. In practice, the temptation to cut, serve and eat is frequently too much (as proved the case on Sunday - witness the icing cascading over the edges of the squares in my photo).

 

All in all, the birthday celebrations were a great success, though the cake and bubbly hangover made yesterday's hike to the top of Djouce mountain in Wicklow quite a bit more painful than it needed to be. Fortune smiles on the brave, however, and in addition to our picnic sandwiches, we had the left-over brownies to fortify us before the march back down. I can think of nothing better than eating a brownie while sitting on the top of a mountain, with the world spread out at your feet and the sun (finally) peeking through the clouds. The perfect end to a lovely weekend.