Grow up........

I went to a 60th birthday party and she's not one of my parents' friends she's my friend.....when did my friends start turning 60? I made (almost) 60 cupcakes, to take with me, using Lily Vanilli's madeira seed cake recipe, omitting the cream and jam interior and adding the omega-3 seed mix instead, to make the healthy option......yeah sort of.

Also this week I realised I'm older than the Prime Minister......that's never happened before. How can I be older than the Prime Minister?

Top tip: go to the cinema and see Beasts of the Southern Wild...astonishing on every level.

Cherry and Seed Madeira Cake for the menopausal.......

Regular readers might have noticed my enjoyment of baked goods in general, cake in particular. I find cooking quite relaxing too, all the chopping and  mixing and stuff. So, with winter looming and a particularly lovely picture of a Cherry and Seed Madeira Cake in one of the Sundays, it was on with the pinny.

This recipe comes from Lily VaniIli who has a bakery off Columbia Road flower market at 6 The Courtyard, Ezra  St. London E2 7RG. I think it was the word Madeira that caught my eye. That and cherry. I like cherries and believe there a few greater pleasures than a brown paper bag filled with fat, ripe cherries. I think I thought there might be Madeira wine in the cake. There isn’t. Or perhaps I planned to take a glass while making it, who knows. I don’t know enough about baking to know the difference between Madeira or Victoria or Pound cake. I just know I like eating cake. My son likes baked goods too and at times like this, when I have weight-gaining food lurking about, I can rely on him to eat most of it in one sitting, thus removing any temptation from me. So, I set to. However, I did not have poppy seeds as recommended in the recipe, along with pumpkin and sesame. 

But being a menopausal woman I do have bags and bags of omega 3 packed mixes of pumpkin, sesame, linseed, flax and sunflower seeds. So, I decided to combine cake with healthy eating and make a menopausal-mixed-seed-and-cherry-Maderia cake. It worked a treat and was utterly delicious. And I ate half the cake before the son even came home.

Top tip: there are few problems that are not better ruminated over with cake, get baking.