ASKED for a STORY on DESSERTS

     When I first moved to England I discovered a popular cake here was called Spotted Dick and as I had an Uncle Dick, straight away began to send items with this name on it to him.   Eventually, I found out that one can buy some varieties of cakes here, in a can, just like a can of pineapple slices or mushroom soup, so I determined to send one of these to him.  I went to my local supermarket and hunted all over the place for one of these cakes in a can, which I had seen before, with no luck.   I finally had to ask a shop assistant for help and at first, he was perplexed about what I was asking for and we struggled in our communication for some time.   We finally reached the point where he figured out that I what I wanted was a 'pudding in a tin' - and with that, he promptly set off to show me exactly where they were to be found.  (hint, not with the canned fruit and veg).   In England, pudding is the generic term for all desserts, including cakes and ice creams and donuts and meringues - not just the sweet, thick, custard-like dish that it is in the states.

     I attempted to make a glorious chocolate cake for one daughter, a couple of years after moving to England, which is when I discovered a few processes were somewhat different than my home-economic classes in high school had taught me.  One was the frosting part and another was a big difference in HOW things are measured, which has taken me another ten years to figure out.   I was going to take this memento of love to her class at school, in the afternoon, on her birthday, which happens to be the day now established as Earth Day, the 22nd of April.  Americans, having come up with the commemoration, have been enthusiastically creating big festivities around it for some years now and we got in on a couple of years of this before moving here.   So, after dropping the girls off to school that morning, I started off making the cake.  I'd worked my way through a very different recipe for frosting, involving cooking and separating and mixing, before discovering I was missing an ingredient, so after setting this aside I ran to town to buy it.  At this time, I discovered I was low on petrol so I stopped off at the station to fill up and then had driven halfway home before remembering I hadn't paid!!   I whipped the car around and returned to the station, only to discover I'd placed my wallet (called purse, in UK) on top of the car while filling it - and drove off with it still there.  The clerks had it all on their CCTV camera and were lovely towards me considering I'd been caught stealing.   But now I couldn't pay so I gave them my information, with promise to return with money later, and returned home in a right state about it.  I began working on the cake again - and discovered the frosting had become as hard as a rock.  I didn't remember my old butter/powdered sugar recipes doing that.   I could not get it to soften, in any way and I no longer had the ingredients, nor the will to start over.  I was struggling to glop it on somehow anyway - this cake had extra eggs, sour cream, chocolate chips, whatever I could think of to make it very rich - and it was becoming a terrible, choppy looking mess when the phone rang and a nice policeman told me he had my wallet, ready for me to pick up.   I couldn't understand how they'd tracked me because I didn't have any id, such as phone numbers or addresses in it, but thank goodness.   It turned out that as I had made a turn around a median island in a roundabout, which was covered with a floral display and happened to have a gardener working on it at that moment - my wallet had flown off the car, right in front of him and he had turned it in.  (pretty good, for an Earth Day event, actually).   My grieving despair turned into delight and I decided I had to take this big, dark brown mess of a cake to my daughter's class as I had promised.   So I marched in, announced it was a "Mud cake" in honour of Earth Day and everyone was happy.   Apparently it tasted so good that people wanted the recipe!   Made.With.Love.  despite all else.

     It was about ten years before I dared to try again.   A couple of years ago, I decided to try making a cake for my youngest daughter, before it was too late and she'd be gone from her childhood home forever.  I had just obtained a book of birthday cake recipes - mainly for it's symbolic, drool inducing, eye candy, never thinking I'd actually create from it and told her to choose one for me to make.  She chose a stunning - actually, they are all stunning - angel food cake which was a swirl of multiple colours in the pink, yellow, orange range.  Probably called Sunrise Angel Delight - no, that couldn't be - Angel Delight is another English pudding concoction, I think.   So I gulped and arranged with a friend who lived clear on the other side of town to borrow her oven, as I'd done before and gathered the ingredients.  What I didn't do, what I should have done, was to make the whole thing at her house, along with the baking.  I set to work, whipping into a viable condition - 18 egg whites (successfully separated out of maybe 20 or 22) - the number of which made my head spin.  I then carefully divided it out into 3 or 4 parts which were even more carefully coloured before being swirled delicately back together and gently set into the pan.   Then, rather than immediately putting into a hot oven, as directed - I drove five miles through congested town traffic to my friend's house and then waited to warm up the oven before baking it.  I would not recommend this method.  The cake, starting with great promise, sadly melted down during the lengthy interim and came out rather flat and dense.  It was still beautiful though and tasted wonderful, showing us the essence of what could have been, so I managed to be a 'good mom', in the end, although a bit flushed and scattered.  Again, Made.With.Love.