You can have your cake and eat it too

I told you I was not overly fond of sweating it out in the kitchen on food which needs fiddly preparation. By fiddly I mean, too much maison plas in the form of dicing and shredding – basically anything which shows how slipshod I am in the kitchen and how useless with a knife. 

However, because I did not feel inclined to hunch over some writing assignments, or worse, edit someone else’s work, I thought I’d assuage my guilt about not working by doing something. So I whipped up a cake. From scratch. With no help from my dear friend Betty Crocker or the Pillsbury Dough Boy. 

Kit sourced the recipe and was quite surprised I did not want help mixing it up. I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. Plus, I’ve a packed week and there’s no gym time available.

Butter cakes are so popular. They’re so basic but it’s hard to get the right consistency. One aims for fluffiness with bite. Sort of like a well-groomed Poodle with a big sense of territoriality. Butter cakes need to have some sort of density so that the flavour of butter has something to cling to. But it needs to be airy as well, to make it more-ish.  My beloved friend, the late Chan Luck Seh of Expomal International used to love my mum’s butter cakes. He was a butter cake fiend and found fault with any other kind of cake. 

I guess not having chocolate chips or cocoa in the house, and the fact that I am feeling his loss a little more keenly today, I made this the first kind of cake I’ve personally baked in this house. 

Not much to look at, but Kit did not have much time to spend on this.

However, as befitting a woman who prefers Baskin Robbins to Haagen Dazs because of all the fun bits in most of BR’s 31 flavours, I had to include cherries in the cake. Well chelory, to be exact.  If you Google the word, you’ll find a lot of the searches have it in relation to diapers! The cake-making version is actually diced papaya, sugared and coloured red or green with food dye. 

I prefer chelory because it is not as dense as glazed cherries. I’ve also found there to be a distinct camp for and against glazed cherries, with the nays outweighing the yeas sharply in my friend circle.  Additionally (and perhaps this is the more truthful reason) I hate dicing up those sticky things, and I am way too proud to present a cake with soggy whole cherries sunk in the bottom and half burnt. 

As a first-time effort, I guess it’ll do. I do wish Mr Chan was around to critique it.