Leaving on a Jet Plane - Emigration Generation at our Doorstep.

Bobby and Martin in Lismore

Yesterday middle son Martin left Dublin for Brisbane, treading a well-worn path all too familiar to most Irish people with children in their twenties and thirties - Generation Emigration as they're being called, most recently in the series run by the Irish Times over the past few weeks. So it was a day of mixed emotions for me, sad to see Martin go on his first big journey since he'd been living overseas as a child, and happy for him to see him embark on a new life adventure. He was travelling with his friend Bobby who is also a graphic designer, and they are going to spend their first days in Australia with friends whom Martin grew up with in Tanzania, and with whose family we have maintained contact over the years since we left Africa. So from the Irish Mammy perspective I have no worries as he'll be looked after and won't get lost travelling to the other side of the world as there's a pair of them in it. They are flying Etihad Airlines, one of those super-duper Mid-Eastern Airlines from the Gulf that fly directly from Dublin to Australia with stops in Abu Dhabi and Singapore but none of the misery of having to navigate Heathrow or the lesser misery of one of the European hubs like Schiphol.

Abu Dhabi first stop!

Martin with William, Shayne, Jany and the girls

Irish Mammy moment in Dublin

JP, Bobby, Martin and Ricky in Lismore

As I write they should be leaving Singapore on the last leg of the journey to Brisbane, and they will no doubt have a few days of jet lag to contend with. I remember when we lived in Laos that the journey west-east from Europe back to Laos was worst for jet lag and it took a few days to reorient to the Orient. But that's probably trying to catch up on lost hours - only 7 in the case of Laos, but 10 or so in the case of Australia I suppose. I haven't checked the detail yet, very provincial of me. In fact Martin and Bobby left on Saturday and will lose out on Sunday and arrive on Monday - almost comparable to Samoa which lost a day in its entirety when they went to the other side of the International Dateline at the end of December. That begs the Table Quiz question - what country will nobody have a birthday on December 29th 2011?  I'm sure it'll feature in Pub Quizzes of the future!

Father and son before heading to the Airport!

We have been anticipating this move for Martin since he finished college - he did his undergrad Degree in Cork and his Masters' in Dublin, both in Graphic Design.  He wasn't able to get much work other than some freelance and a stint in a local printing and design business, but from the way things were going in Ireland with the downturn in the economy it didn't look great. So he worked in the 5* Westbury Hotel in Dublin for the past 10 months, and managed to save enough to fund his Aussie adventure. The visa is a year's working holiday visa and he will have to change jobs every three months, and maybe he will get sposnsorship and be able to extend his visa - otherwise the only way to stay on is to work in rural Australia for a while.

Hope the scales isn't loaded!

Yes I packed it myself...!

The current government has got into hot water recently over tactless remarks by the shoot-from-the-lip Finance Minister Michael Noonan over emigration being a Lifestyle Choice -an unfortunate turn of phrase that resonated with what Brian Lenihan and Eamon de Valera had said back in the years of mass almost forced emigration of the 1950s and 1980s - it smacks of heedless callousness in the light of all the families whose children would prefer to find work in Ireland and make a life here. I don't know if Martin will make a new life in another country or whether the economy here will revert to some normality to allow him a feasible return.

A final coffee - delaying the goodbyes!

He spent the last couple of weeks at home and then went to Cork to say goodbye to his former college friends there and to Dublin for a final farewell. We had a small party with the family and some of his friends from Lismore last weekend - the days of the Australian or American Wake seem a bit passé and melodramatic in this age of instant messaging via Facebook, Twitter and Skype - new verbs in the vocabulary must surely be To Skype and To Facebook, while To Tweet has been totally hijacked from the birds! We had a nice evening with a curry that went down well with everyone - included were the much-requested homemade chappatis - and it turned into a Boys' Night In with somebody's X-Box produced to play football games on the big TV.

Into the future!

I had a brief Kleenex Moment at the Departure Gate yesterday - no shame in that, as I got a small sense of how my dear mother must have felt with all the farewells she had to endure over two decades of my life. It was so weird to see him off in the vast emptiness of the futuristic boom-time Terminal 2 which was built for another era and economy. Now it has the whiff of a Bertie Ahern/Paddy the Plasterer white elephant about it, somewhat vindicating Michael O'Leary's vitriolic put-down of it over the years. It reminded me of that great Stephen King novella and film The Langoliers, about time-warped air travel and deserted terminals. Martin was the only one at the departure gate, as Bobby had gone through earlier. It was strange to be saying goodbye and turning back to the car park, instead of going through to head for the heat of our destinations over the years of our lives in Africa and Asia - but now it's the turn of the younger generation and that our children are making the move should come as no surprise to us. We can only wish Martin and Bobby well and look forward to new holiday destinations in the future!

Martin on the bridge - with Jan ahead with the suitcase!

Terminal 2 - the deserted airport!

Double-take Birthday Cakes - Supersized and Minimized

I promised I'd post the recipe for the birthday cake I made for hubby Jan's big birthday celebration recently, which I wrote about here.

So here it is - it's simply a very big Victoria sponge cake with butter icing - lots of it. It went down a treat at the party, people seemed genuinely surprised that I'd made it which made me wonder if baking is really going out of style.

There are lots of specialist bakeries now which do amazing things with photos in edible icing on top of the cakes, or cartoon characters, but I guess they rely on the technology of edible teeshirt-printing equivalence.

I still prefer the home-made cakes to the shop-bought ones as the home-made variety have more substance and can have a fair bit of style as well - at least that's what I was aiming for, and I hope I achieved it to some extent.

Here goes - not for the fainthearted and have plenty of ingredients in stock - and at least a day to prepare and bake unless you have a couple of roasting tins and a large oven. I don't, so I made one cake at a time, and baked them individually in the same roasting tin, lined with baking parchment. I made three large cakes but only used two and a half - I kept the other half for a small cake on the actual birthday which was the Saturday after Thursday's party. You can see both cakes - little and large - in this post.

Prepare a sturdy cake board if you don't have one - I cut some strong cardboard from boxes that housed some garden chairs from Lidl, and stuck two big squares together with packing tape and covered them with tinfoil/aluminium foil. The cake board will have to carry a few kilos of finished cake!


Ingredients (for each cake)

1. 500gm/1lb Self-Raising Flour (or plain flour and 5 teaspoons baking powder)
2. 500gm/1lb Vanilla Sugar (I use normal white/caster sugar kept in a Kilner jar with some vanilla pods - the best flavour and beats concentrated vanilla essence hands down. If you use essence, get natural vanilla)
3. 500gm/1lb Butter, softened
4. 8 Eggs
5. 4-5 tablespoons hot water

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 189 degrees Centigrade/350 degrees Fahrenheit
2. Place all the ingredients in a large bowl.
3. Using a hand-held electric mixer, mix all the ingredients to a soft dropping consistency.
4. (You can be purist about this and cream the butter and sugar before adding the eggs and flour slowly - I find the one-step method worked fine and didn't curdle on me. I like short cuts!)
5. Spoon the mix into a large square or rectangular tin - a roasting tin is ideal - lined with Baking Parchment (Waxed paper).
6. Bake in the centre of the pre-heated oven for 30-40 minutes until well risen and golden brown, and firm in the centre - test with a skewer or knitting needle in the middle, which should come out dry.
7. Cool in tin for 10 minutes, then carefully lift out by wax paper and leave to cool on a wire rack.
8. Bake two or three of these cakes, then when completely cool, prepare to decorate to your liking.

Butter Icing /Frosting

1. 1.5kg/3lbs Icing Sugar
2. 750gms/1.5 lbs Butter, softened
3. 1 tablespoon Lemon Juice to tone down the sweetness, if liked

Icing Variations:

• Cocoa powder - if making Chocolate Icing.
• Food Colouring - if making coloured icing
• Instant Coffee dissolved in a little hot water - if making Coffee Icing
• Orange juice and zest - if making Orange Icing

Beat the butter in large bowl, then sieve in the sugar and continue beating until smooth and creamy, and add lemon juice or any preferred flavourings/colouring.

Preparation

1. Place one cake upside down on foil cake board, and cut another cake to square if off if you like a square cake. Otherwise a rectangle is fine.
2. Spread with Strawberry Jam.
3. Spread stiff whipped cream on the jam.
4. Place the second cake on top of the cream - right side up.
5. Spread butter icing over top and sides of cake.
6. Decorate as wished - I used Chocolate icing for piping and writing, and 70% chocolate buttons/chips to decorate border.

Handy Tip

I used a piping syringe and nozzle to pipe the top decorations and then another nozzle for the continuous border around the cake sides near the board.
For the writing I didn't have a fine writing nozzle - lost in the mists of time and the kitchens of Africa or Asia - and I improvised with a freezer bag - put the icing into the bag, a few tablespoons is enough for writing a few words like I did - and snip a very small bit off the corner so you can squeeze a small trail of the icing through and guide it for writing whatever you wish.
No need for fancy sets, I know you can make greaseproof piping bags, but this was handier as I think you need nozzles for the greaseproof paper bags.

Enjoy the end product - I did enjoy making it, the guests loved it and then we had a small cream sponge cake with the leftovers for the birthday itself, which had a candle per decade!

It keeps well for a few days, once in an airtight tin or wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Christmas gifts that keep on giving - and Happy New Year 2010!

I got some lovely presents for Christmas - silver jewellery from hubby, DVDs of the Irish TV series Pure Mule which is a parable of the Celtic Tiger and it's demise - Monty Python's live stage show and Michael (ex-Python) Palin's Pole to Pole from sons, and some nice baking and cookery things - Neven Maguire's new book Home Chef, and a nice pastry template cutter and a brownies book with storage tin and silver boxes from oldest son and girlfriend and some nice toiletries from teen daughter. I like the thought that went into the presents and that matters more than any monetary value - I will get lots of use from the cookery books and I have alread tried one of the cake recipes (Lime and Coconut Meringue Pie) and used the pie template cutter for our New Year's party.

I am wearing the jewellery over the Christmas holiday period as I am off work for a whole week and a half; I have the DVDs to look forward to - I can't see Pure Mule as something the whole family will enjoy as it has probably more girlie appeal, whereas Monty Python suits the boys' humour and Pole to Pole will be something hubby will enjoy too, as we met Michael Palin in Lismore when he was the main speaker at Immrama 2005. Also Pole to Pole has a lot of nostalgia value for us as he goes through Tanzania to Kigoma and on the Liemba ferry to Zambia - we lived near Kigoma for years in Mishamo refugee settlement and spent a lot of time in Kigoma and we too went to Ujiji - famed for the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" encounter between Stanley and Livingstone.

So, despite the recession, we had a lovely Christmas, culminating in a nice low-key New Year's Eve party last night. We had a gathering of friends and with all the family together (except my mother who is in long-stay care for a number of years and sadly has dementia) it was a lovely evening, with nice home-cooked food and desserts, and good company. We went to a lovely wedding of the daughter of old friends the day before New Year's Eve, and enjoyed the reception in the Park Hotel in Dungarvan, where we had a delicious meal and danced off the calories to Dale Haze and the Champions - who (along with Gina) were stalwarts of the showband era and my dancehall days back in the 70s!

What more could we want? We have a lot to be thankful for in so many ways - we have good health, our first grandchild due in February and live in peace and comfort, compared to so many in the world living in conflict and poverty. We never put huge store by material wealth and try to live within our means (which might prove challenging with the imminent pay cuts in 2010!) and as we were happiest in our "good life" days in Africa and Asia when we really did have a simple life, we are liable to be philosophical about the excesses of life in Ireland in recent years. It reached the point of vulgarity and tacky conspicuous consumption at the height of the Celtic Tiger, and that unsustainable bubble had to burst at some point.

I'll stop now before descending to mawkish reminiscence and say Happy New Year to you all out there in the blogosphere and here's hoping that the downturn will be reversed before the first year of this new decade is over.

The photos show us at the New Year's Eve party, some of the Christmas presents and resulting tarts (Apple with Blueberries, apple with cloves) and the cookery books. and my starter at the wedding - chicken and mushroom vol au vents - yummy!

New Year Reflections

One of the nice things about a new year is the new beginning that it inspires - all kinds of good intentions that generally don't amount to a hill of beans by the end of January, but give a sense of purpose to this dreary time of year - at least in this part of the world.

This year in particular is faced with some trepidation by everyone I know, what with all the economic doom and gloom. Global conflicts are in mounting turmoil, with the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the recently stepped-up and relentless onslaught on Gaza - we can only hope that the imminent Obama presidency will restore some peace, balance and reason to the international stage.

Here in Lismore we welcomed in 2009 with a recession party at home with our family and friends, and even in these lean times we had some bubbly to toast the new year. We heard the church bells ringing at St. Carthage's Cathedral at midnight, and someone said there was an extra second added on to allow for the varying length of the year - not that I noticed! The party went on well into the New Year and it was very enjoyable.

We had a fine feast of easy-to-prepare-in-advance food reflecting our past lives in tropical climes - curries (beef, chicken and vegetable, to cater for all tastes), with rice and dal and chappatis, the most versatile street food of all for dipping and wrapping, and appropriately frugal and guilt free! Jany, Shayne's girlfriend, made delicious Dutch tomato soup with meatballs, which was a meal in itself and not at all reminiscent of a soup kitchen! Desserts are my forté and we had a good selection - apple tart, lemon meringue pie, banoffee pie and fresh fruit salad with whipped cream on the side for everything!

(You can see some of the end results on the photo, behind Jan and me.)

Everything went down a treat, and we had the leftover food on New Year's day, which was spent tidying up the post-party debris, and relaxing in between dishwasher loads.

Inkeeping with the spirit of change, we moved some furniture around today, for a new look to our living spaces, and might make more minor upheavals tomorrow - where will it all end?

May you all have an optimistically Happy New Year and a recession-proof 2009!

(There's a link below to a Facebook group I made, Cakes, Bakes and Tasty Treats - self-explanatory, it does exactly what it says on the tin! Have a look and enjoy the recipes - all tried and tested by willing guinea pigs!)

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=98291115374&ref=mf