Just Desserts - having our Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and eating it

I hadn't made this in years until just over a week ago when I was heading to visit a friend in her mobile home in Clonea Caravan Park. My previous post here was on the howler road sign near the park entrance so it's fitting that the cake recipe follow.

It was a very pleasant evening with a group of friends and colleagues and we had a great laugh; it was one of those girly evenings that are just inexplicably enjoyable. Our hostess had laid on a lovely cold buffet - an assortment of delicious salads - which we enjoyed alfresco as it was a warm sunny evening. For dessert we all brought something to the table - including my Pineapple upside-down cake. It was eclipsed by a fab Pavlova laden down with fresh strawberries and raspberries nesting in the whipped cream, and a lovely Swiss Roll. I cheated a bit and bought along a tub of ready-whipped fresh cream on my way to the beach, as I didn't know if the caravan would have the wherewithal to whip cream and anyway it seemed like too much hard work for an after-work get-together.

As we were all driving home (except the hostess who was already home!) we passed on the wine which meant no sore heads the next day. Always a good thing on a weekday. The provenance of this recipe is an old Dutch magazine cutout - I have the original on a pulled-out page from a Margriet (I think 1988 or thereabouts - the date is obliterated) which is tattered and dog-eared, but as it lives inside one of my mother's old cookery books it will last another few decades. I used to make this frequently when we lived in the tropics as we had such delicious fresh pineapples - even from our own garden in some instances - and it's so simple that the ingredients were always to hand. Now I use the canned slices with the hole in the middle - you could use fresh but it's a bit of a lottery how they turn out - sometimes they are just right but often they are either underripe and hard or over-ripe and starting to rot in spots.


Hubby has a theory that I feel has some merit - that it's preferable to eat pineapple that's locally canned close to the source (i.e. the pineapple plots) at its prime ripeness than to eat dodgy "fresh" pineapple that's got huge airmiles clocked up (or shipping miles) after being picked under-ripe on the off-chance that it'll reach optimum ripeness as it arrives on the shelves or market stalls. When we lived in Tanzania the Dabaga Canning Factory was next door to the Concern office in Ipogoro where the most wonderful smells emanated throughout the year, contingent on the seasonality of the crops - this is a prime example of green organic and fairly traded food production and I have a lot of regard for it; you can check out its brochure here.

So give it a try and you won't be disappointed.

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake
(translated from the Dutch by me - hope it's accurate enough!)

Ingredients

1. 175g/6oz self-raising flour
2. 200g//7oz sugar
3. 65g/3oz soft butter/margarine
4. 1 egg
5. 1 teasp. vanilla essence or 1 sachet vanilla sugar
6. pinch salt
7. 1 can pineapple slices
8. Whipped Cream or Ice Cream to serve

Method

1. Grease a Springform Baking Tin
2. Line with drained Pineapple slices and half-slices as shown in photo
3. Mix all the other ingredients together to make a smooth semi-stiff batter, more pouring than dropping consistency
4. Pour the cake batter over the Pineapple slices
5. Bake in oven pre-heated to 150 degrees Centigrade/300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 40 mins until baked through and golden brown
6. Cool in tin, then turn out onto serving plate
7. If you want to glaze it after baking, see Handy Tip below and be sure to use ovenproof plate while browning in oven
8. Serve slices with Whipped Cream or Ice Cream

Handy Tip

Instead of greasing the Springform baking tin, you could line it with 50g/2oz melted butter with 100g brown sugar dissolved in it. This will caramelise in the baking to give a nice golden-brown glaze.

I forgot to do this at the start but at the end I improvised (in the manner of the best/most forgetful bakers!) by adding the melted butter to the finished cake and sprinkling over the brown sugar and then returning it to the top shelf of the oven for 5-10 mins until the same effect was achieved.

This is delicious with a nice cuppa tea or coffee, and it has a lovely sticky-pudding-y texture which is quite filling (so you shouldn't over-indulge), yet healthy enough to be one of your Five-a-Day (fruit'n'veg) portions if you are seriously guilt-tripping yourself!

On Colonialism, Craft and Cookery Books - my not-So-Guilty Pleasures

I've been visiting a lot of beautiful craft blogs lately where I am in wonder at the skills of the people who make such lovely things, while thinking "if only I had the time, could I do that?" Well I dabble - that's about all the time work and real life leave me to indulge what is incredibly relaxing and challenging and ultimately extremely satisfying. Making something from scratch by hand or sewing machine gives me a great buzz, and I used to do a lot more of it when the kids were small and I was either full-time in the home or working part-time or home schooling.

I qualify that by reminding readers most of this time was spent in the African bush or a provincial town (Iringa) in Tanzania, or in the backwater quietness of Vientiane in Laos, where we had plenty of support in the form of house staff who did a lot of the work that would normally be my lot. Does that sound dreadfully colonial and exploitative? Bet it did - but I knew it would, and I have defended it so often that I genuinely feel I can stand over it as being neither of the above.

As many of you who live in the so-called LDCs (Less-Developed Countries) of the world will know (Lynda, I'm thinking of you here) human capital is central to the national economy, and people have the expectation that if you come into their country with a foreign NGO (Non-Government Organisation) as we did, that the least you will do is provide local employment. Had we come over all virtuous and insisted on doing everything ourselves we would have found it a lot more difficult to gain recognition and acceptance. We would have been labelled mean and stingy and unwilling to help people help themselves through the dignity of honest work. As the ethos of our NGO (Concern Worldwide) was not to give handouts but to provide sustainabale development for people, it would have sat uncomfortably with that ethic.

As it was, we were blessed with having household staff wherever we lived who were (clichéd though it sounds) very much part of our family, and we still have contact with many of them, via the blessings of Facebook and email as well as snail mail. The children grew up with them and their children, and they were at the various family and birthday parties as guests and friends and I love to follow their children as they grow up. The staff were like any employee of the NGO, with the same terms and conditions - living in Socialist and post-Communist countries ensured that Labour Law was strictly pro-worker and we adhered to it as fairly as we expect it to be here at home.

So that's my little polemic rant- I do tend to digress all over the place in my posts, maybe I should curb the stream of consciousness a little, as I never know when I start a post where it will take me. I hope the readers can cope with this - please be brutally honest if you can't and tell me to stick to the point - I can handle constructive criticism (I think!)

This post was supposed to be about my craft and cookery books - so I will share a few photos of the ones I love, including some new knitting books I got this week - one on Party Knits and one on Knits for Kids - New Knits on the Block. The latter is perfect now that I can indulge Sofia and as the two were for sale at a knockdown price of €6.99 for two - on a BOGOF (Buy one get one free) offer - who could resist!

The other ones are journals - one is a Knitting Journal and has some lovely patterns and handy tips, while the other is a Book Lover's Companion. This was a bit sidelined when I started logging my books on iRead on Facebook and Library Thing online (see the sidebar in this blog) but I do print off the reviews and keep them in the journal. I have to start logging my knits in the journal too, with photos. Do you like the new bonnet I made Sofia? It's sitting on a cushion hand-embroidered in a Women's Project in Saidpur in Bangladesh in 1980!

The cookery books I love are on the bookshelves I photographed here - there are lots gathered over many years and plenty from recent years that were either given as presents or bought in the workplace bookclub sales - these are ubiquitous in Irish workplaces (probably elsewhere) and sales reps deliver a selection of samples to the offices for a week or so and they have wonderful knockdown prices for everything - so a Jamie Oliver marked at £30 can be had for €12 or so. I've got beautiful books for a tenner that would be three times that in the shops, so as I'm a sucker for a good bargain, once again I'm just a girl who can't say no! I love the Samuelson African Continent cookbook - it was a present from Anne in New Jersey, an old friend. Our recent houseguest Tandy (my knitting student!) gave me the BBC Masterchef book - you can see us in the photo. It ties in with the TV series so should prove fun to try out.

As I find all these books as pleasurable to read as to work from I think I'm getting plenty of great value - and I know from looking at those blogs of similar leanings that I'm not alone in that opinion! I actually use them as recipe books too - and as you can see from previous knitting posts - I get through quite a few of the patterns too!

My maternal grandfather was a tailor so maybe I inherited some of the gene pool there, I certainly have some skill in that line despite hating home ec. in school, yet I taught myself on his ancient treadle Singer machine where I made dolls' clothes, then I got an old Brother machine which died after a number of years making maxi dresses and fancy frocks for dinner dances (it was the Seventies after all!) and then I got my current machine, a Singer with lots of fancy stitching, in 1986 when we lived in the bush in Tanzania. It's a testament to the longevity of the brand that it's still going strong 24 years on, as fit for purpose as ever.


Some day I will get back to dressmaking - but I aim to lose about 5-8 kg first to get back to size 12 (no, I don't know what a size zero is and I never met anyone who did or was - but that may be just US sizing! I'm aiming for 12 UK or 40 European size and then I'll get dressmaking again - there's a goal to strive for and I have some classy pieces from my previous size 12 life that I can't wait to get into again. I made suits, skirts, bermudas, trousers, tops, dresses - you name it, I made it.

I even made a safari suit which hubby sported whenever visiting dignitaries like President Nyerere came on project visits.And as my middle son reminded me recently, my kids might need therapy in years to come to work through the trauma of being dressed in chaircovers and curtains - Sound of Music-style - during their formative years in Africa! As our curtains were the colourful "Vitenge" cloths worn by the women they made great curtains and chair covers, and it was a small step to move into kids' clothing. As the son said, many times they blended into the furniture like chameleons!

Our New Bread-Maker - a Paean to Culinary Revolution

Last week Lidl - that bastion of bargain-basement German discounts - had a bread-maker for sale on its deals of the week and as usual I saw it in the weekly flyer a few days before it went on sale. I'd never had a bread-making machine before, always priding myself on being the ultimate bread maker and baker since I'd had no choice in the matter during our years abroad where fresh bread was only feasible when it was home-baked. So it was time to embrace change and go for the techie option.

I think there was a certain element of grandstanding and a little snob value attached to being a slave to the kneading and proving and re-kneading and re-proving and getting a great result wasn't always guaranteed. Certainly in the tropics a lot depended on having quality ingredients which wasn't always a given.

We had flour from wheat that grew in Njombe in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania and a 90kg bag would be brought home whenever we had the chance to visit our Concern friends there in the early '80s (we were then with the Lutheran World Federation in the Burundi refugee settlements in Rukwa Region of Western Tanzania). This sack of wheat had to be sun-dried to rid it of the weevils that invariably invaded the grain. Then it was brought to the local maize mill to be ground into coarse wheatflour. We tried to battle further weevil infestation by milling the wheat in small 5 or 10 kilo batches, and keeping it in the chest freezer. As this freezer tended to chill rather than freeze, as we only had electricity generated for 9 out of 24 hours, it was more a chest fridge than freezer, albeit erratic even at that!

It did keep the flour dormant - or the creepy-crawlies! Nonetheless, we had to sieve the flour prior to making bread or cakes, as there was always the possibility of few rogue larvae camouflaged in the flour. Logic allowed us to eat the bread undisturbed by its parasite potential as we figured it was a) well cooked at high temperature and b) the extra protein couldn't be too bad, and c) lots of people were happily eating such "bush tucker" with no ill-effects and some had a certain cachet in tribal circles - such as the "ssenene" or grasshoppers that were a delicacy ranked with the flying termites in haute cuisine circles.

But I digress - this was supposed to be a post on our new bread maker. Well hubby Jan has taken to it with enthusiasm and it looks like we'll never want for fresh bread again, with all the delicious loaves he's made since Thursday last. I am delighted, as I was always a bit skeptical that a machine could equal or even surpass human endeavour. Here's one big climbdown from this convert - with all the attendant zeal of the convert I am happy to say that I love the bread maker and its produce!

I have watched in amazement at the different through-the-looking-lid stages of the process and it is basically the same stages as human endeavour with all the elbow grease removed. A standard loaf takes about 3 hours to bake from scratch, and includes two or three provings with plenty of kneading; and to my surprise and delight, the wonderful yeasty smell of the rising dough and the baking bread aroma wafting through the house is enough to send any estate agent staging a house for sale into ecstasies!

The machine is programmed to deal with 12 different functions including every imaginable bread type - white, brown, French, gluten-free, sweet, buttermilk, dough, pasta and cake - and then to cap it all it makes jam! I haven't even gone down that route yet but it promises to be great fun trying out all the permutations.

Any of you readers who have bread makers will be familiar with all this magic and have a good laugh at my naive wonder at the scope of our new toy - but I have been enjoying the end results for the past few days, and so too has our old friend Tandy who's visiting from London and Papua-New Guinea for a few days while we bridge the past 16 years since we last met in Tanzania.

She and I (me?) were dab hands at bread baking for all the years it was a necessary task in Africa in the absence of any bakeries in most places, while half-decent bakeries in Iringa were thin on the ground. We had one Greek bakery which made a dense white bread, whose shape was the only resemblance it bore to a baguette. It was nice bread only on the day of baking and didn't reach our exacting standards so our own bread won the day hands down.

Bread is such an emotive food - across religions you have unleavened and leavened bread, Communion bread, bread of life - it epitomises so much and is a food common to all cultures, from the chappati to the tortilla, soda and yeast bread, and breaking bread is a universal gesture of acceptance of the stranger in our midst. Long may it continue to symbolise hospitality and the Céad Míle Fáilte in our house.

The photos show the machine before and after operation, the end product both in and out of the tin and being enjoyed with the ubiquitous cuppa tea, the control panel and the packaging

The Lesser-Spotted Google Earth Street View Car

Yesterday I was driving on my rounds at work and around lunchtime I was planning a visit to a remote farmhouse down a very narrow country road. Imagine my surprise when I turned into the road to find myself behind a very odd looking car, a brand new red Opel Astra - 09 registration - with a tripod on the roof-rack topped with a weird looking object that I knew to be the Google Earth Street-view Camera.

These strange cars have been spotted like rare birds in the vicinity of Dungarvan in West Waterford in recent weeks and this is the third time I've seen them. This time I was prepared and like a true anorak I whipped out my trusty Panasonic Lumix digital camera and took a few photos.

I have been amused at the indignation that has been expressed over privacy invasion and civil liberties in the UK in recent weeks (where Street View has gone live and been given a mixed reception) by the "victims" of this cruising camera car. There have been some hilarious stories of people spotted where they shouldn't have been, or cars that weren't pixelated out (number plates and faces are supposed to be pixellated but there have been glitches) and identified by spouses as being where they weren't meant to be. Also people have been indignant that their des res isn't all it's cracked up to be on the property pages when the prospective buyers can google earth it in its original street view!

I absolutely adore Google Earth and Google Maps - I think it was made for nosey parkers like me who love to see where places are and how they look, and since discovering it some years back I visit regularly. I know where my friend in New Jersey lives, and what her street looks like, and I also know that my son's rooftop of his apartment block is visible quite clearly on it, and I am annoyed that Lismore is not given an enhanced view, and is quite blurry, unlike other cities and towns of Ireland.

Another thing I love about it is that there are plenty of photos posted by various people, and they give a totally different impression of a place. When hubby visited Reykjavik in Iceland last year I was able to see the places he was raving about, like the geysir and the blue lagoon - hot springs in February snow! In Tanzania I can go on a nostalgia trip through Dar-es-Salaam and track the roads I drove daily to and from the International School, or out to Bahari Beach and the Kunduchi guest house where we spent many happy days on visits from Iringa. I can visit Iringa and my old haunts like India Street, Lulu's, Hasty Tasty, and Gangilonga Rock.

Of course I can also see these places on the wonderful groups that have sprung up on Facebook to celebrate places we love. One of my favourite is the group "I know Iringa inside out" and I have posted a number of photos of the kids in their homeschool days there, much to their cringing embarassment!

So if you haven't already got it, get downloading Google Earth for free and enjoy more time-wasting than Facebooking or blogging combined. You can justify it by its vaguely educational geographical appeal, if you need to appease your conscience or your partner! There's even a blogger widget which might be fun to add.

The internet is a wonderful place to connect and reconnect with people, when it is used as such, and I have renewed links with old friends from years ago through this very modern medium.

So the art of letter writing might be dead but as long as it is replaced by good communication by email and blogging I think I can live with it! It's a paradigm shift as the boffins might say but I am glad to be able to join in and go with the flow, and am heartened to see so many of my generation linked up through cyberspace. It makes the world seem a much smaller and more connected place - a global village in a positive way.

To finish up, I want to share this lovely photo of the cherry blossom in full bloom on the N25 ring road in Dungarvan yesterday. It might even end up on Street View!