We share our mothers health

My grandmother turned 84 on Monday. 84. I can't imagine where I'll be at 30, never mind living into my 80s. Maybe everything will evolve radically and it'll be normal to live well beyond that, although I am not someone who would want to live forever.

Because she lives at the coast and we live about 14h by car away from her I was not thinking about baking her a cake. But then my aunt decided to fly down, and suddenly we had to fashion some last minute red velvet cupcakes to go along for a trip to the coast. I am not the biggest fan of red velvet, because it's basically a fake chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting. Rather give me chocolate on chocolate, not the fake red stuff. I have tried making a red velvet cake using beetroot as colourant, which worked, but still I wouldn't do it again. However, these were requested, so I made them.

Again, the recipe is shamelessly stolen from Nigella Lawson, although I substituted yoghurt for the buttermilk, added 2TB of red food colouring (not the paste, the liquid kind) and made up the frosting as I went along.

Here are the results:

It's a Good Life

My mom reused the birth-announcement-card as a birthday card this year. Now I know I was born at 00.25 AM. Being born at twenty-five minutes into the day turned out to be a good sign for my 25th birthday. It was the first time in my life that there was no one in the house with me on the day. Normally someone puts out flowers and presents and a cake, even if they had to already leave for work/school.

This time my mom wrote down clues for me to find objects stashed in the house. It wasn't entirely successful because she thought writing down clues about what the present was, and not about its location, would help me find them. No wonder we suck when we're partners in 30 Seconds. Nothing a phone call couldn't fix though.

I am aware that as soon as you hit the double digits, birthdays become less cool. No more goodie bags at the end of a party, no more running around and frolicking in the pool, no more waiters at Spur bringing you something with candles on it and singing to you. Then all you care about is turning 16, turning 18 and getting your licence, and, the big one, turning 21, because then you are an adult and your parents pay for your last big fiesta.

I am still not an adult, but somehow, 25 feels like no one can treat me like a child any more. At a quarter of a century into life, it is a great balance between having experienced enough not to be a completely ignorant fool who thinks she knows everything (me at 19) and still being young enough to depart from what I know without the weight of mortgages, car payments and a long career at the same company.

This was the first birthday of being a semi-adult where I thought, well, you might just be able to do anything you want successfully. And the reason for this was all the great people I have in my life. My mom made a gigantic effort to bake a cake and organise a treasure hunt. She also involved my aunt and cousin to fly up a cape I wanted (yes, cape, like superman-ish, but better). My sister also helped with this cross-country endeavour and spent hours looking for a silk dress she thought I might like (I do).

My friend K planned a super surprise brunch date, with awesome self-made presents. Another friend called completely out of the blue from France and sent me the funniest YouTube video. I got  'Happy Birthday' sung to me via WhatsApp and sent in messages, in emails, in Facebook posts. Other friends, family and neighbours called. Often, sure, it was because someone had been told by FB that this was the day of my birth, but I appreciated all the little and great efforts equally.

William Somerset Maugham said that "we are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person". A birthday provides the opportunity to reflect on what one has done in the past year, how things have changed or not, and which friends you still wish to invite to your party. I remember how I realised a friendship was over: for the first time since 7th grade, I was not invited to her birthday party. 

Somehow, this birthday made me realise the truth of W. Somerset Maugham's quote: things change all the time, people drift apart, and we should value the ones that remain, steadily, in your life because they are the one's that will make an effort to celebrate you being born even if you aren't throwing a party this year. They are the ones that will be there throughout the curve balls that life throws at us, and in turn, so will you, because nobody can make it on their own. 

 

Never without cake. This one: Frozen Chocolate Mousse Cake. 

That invitation is all I'm waiting on

In one week I turn 25. I was watching Smash and the one character also celebrated her birthday. Her GBF tells her that birthdays present an opportunity reminisce about what one has achieved in the year and how one is different, somehow. Last year I was in the middle of my degree and I was all supercertain about where I was heading, but then came 2013 with its roller-coaster-ride of rejection and now it means is looking elsewhere. 

But with birthdays come presents, which are a lot of fun to find and wrap up. Ja, I get a bit overzealous when it comes to wrapping. A friend is also celebrating his birthday today, so his bottle of wine is hopefully made somewhat more exciting looking like this: 

Veels geluk liewe maatjie

For my mother's birthday we pre-celebrated on Sunday with a wine and chocolate party. We made tamale pie, chevin balls, a sundried tomato tart, various cheeses and a double chocolate cheesecake. And wine, of course. Lots of wine. Wine Wine Wine. We are really fortunate to be able to purchase great wine at cheaper prices (haha, that sounds like a sales pitch), so for the party wine we went to Checkers and got four different types of their Odd Bins wine. The idea behind odd bins is to get great wine but to make it more affordable for the customers because it is not branded (well, besides Odd Bins). So you can see what type of wine it is, what region and what year it is from, but apart from that, you get nothing. Try the Pinotage #703 for R44.99 and you'll see what I mean.

Anyways. I baked my mom a cake, because that is what one does when it is birthday time.
Nom nom nom. It really turned out well.

Here is the recipe:

Double-chocolate baked cheesecake ( Sunday Times Food Section 24 March 2013, p.7)

Base:
200g chocolate digestive biscuits
1 tsp cinnamon
90g melted butter

Filling:
500g cream cheese
2/3 cup castor sugar
1tsp vanilla
1 tbsp lemon juice
4 eggs
60g dark chocolate, chopped

Topping:
200g dark chocolate
1/3 cup sour cream

Preheat oven to 170°

So, start by spraying a springform pan and lining it with baking paper. I omit the baking paper because we have this cool cake lifter thing, but if you don't, I suggest lining it in order to remove the cake more easily later on.
Then crush the biscuits in a food processor, add the cinnamon and the butter, mix it all together and press it into the bottom of your pan. Then put it in the refrigerator to cool.

For the filling, beat the cream cheese with the sugar until it is smooth. I didn't have enough cream cheese so substituted mascarpone for some. Then add the vanilla and the lemon juice, beat again. Next add the eggs, and, yes, beat again. Lastly fold in the chocolate pieces. Pour the filling into the base and bake for 50 min ( or until the top is slightly brown but still wobbly). Let the cake cool down.

For the topping melt together the chocolate and the sour cream, whisk it all together until it is nice and glossy, and spread it over your cooled cake.

Refrigerate until the chocolate is set, remove your pan and taaada, you can serve your cake and eat it, too.

Hello ingredients

This would be your base

Folding in the chocolate pieces.

What the baked cheesecake looks like. 

I topped the cake off with some pomegranate seeds because it looked kind of empty, but you could add berries or peaches or shaved white chocolate curls or nothing. 

I've got to take it on the otherside

Mondays are exam days. Every Monday for three weeks. It's well spaced, so there is enough time for some partying in between the studying. Yesterday evening Town Hall in Joburg celebrated their 2nd birthday, and we were eager to have a little fiesta with them. And by fiesta I mean excessive amounts of tequila and music.

In our eagerness, we pre-bought tickets online and made sure to arrive at a respectable time. It's about a 45min drive to Joburg from Pretoria, so this party had to be worth driving to another city for. But in our naiveté we were sure it would be.

Instead of dancing like a maniac or profiting from the open bar, however, we stood outside in a queue for more than two hours. I left my coat in the car because I thought, Hah, we'll just walk through the door with our little pre-bought tickets, and then you don't want to sweat like a gorilla with your coat inside. Mistake of the night.

I don't know how a venue can be this badly organised. I assume that owner/manager/whoever works there knows approximately how many people can fit inside, and then they can decide how many tickets can be pre-sold and sold at the door. So how the fuck do you keep about 150 people standing outside for the evening, when all of those people had pre-bought tickets? The tempting bass-sounds that kept pumping though the walls weren't helping either.

At around 23.00 they closed both doors. Then they reopened them to say that only those with tickets could enter. Problem was, everyone had tickets. We stood around for a while longer and then decided that even if we would get it, it would probably take another hour, and by then the dance floor would be so packed that one would be unable to move, and the open bar not worth it. Our original plan was to be there at 9ish and leave at 1ish, so this was not worth it. Refund please.

Anyways, so on our way home there is this Maxi's that is built over the highway. Real classy. We thought it was a 24h-open joint. It wasn't. Another fail for the night, another disappointment in my going-out career. We got some Milo at the Maxi's that was open (the one next to the petrol garage, not the awesome one over the road).

In the end we were home by 1 AM. It was as though we had gone out properly, but we were neither inebriated, nor sweaty, nor were our clothes smelly from condensed bodily odours and cigarette smoke. This night was a luremus, and no one was left satisfied.

Beet me

Tomorrow is a birthday in the house, so we had a brunch today for which cake was needed. A friend and I recently baked a red velvet cake, which is why a red-velvet-cheesecake sounded even better. Instead of using fake food colouring I thought the colour from the beets would make it equally red. Alas, no. Whatever. It still tastes quite nice. Not sure if red velvet will ever become my favourite, but it is worth trying different recipes and  finding out which ones are a success and which ones should rather not be tried again. 

You can find the recipe on Recipe Girl, the cheesecake itself is quite delicious. Instead of the red food colouring, I baked four beets in the oven with the cheesecake ( saving energy and preserving more colour than when boiled), then I peeled their skins of, cut them in small pieces and puree-d them. It helped to add a teaspoon or so of water. I guess that if you want the cake a proper red, go for the food colouring. But if you have some objection to fake colouring, go for the beet. You don't taste it too much, but the cake looks more brown than red due to the cocoa powder that is added. I wonder if one could leave out the cocoa and just add the beets? Or would the flavour then be too strong? Hmm. 

 

Volgende jaar Wien

Happy Birthday :)

happy birthday carol

I'm part of couchsurfing ( if you don't know what it is, check out their website here and join in :) and a few weeks ago I received a message from a young man in Brazil, Walter, who asked me and many other around the world to send him a short video with the message "Happy Birthday" for his girlfriend Carol.

Check out the result here:

Even though I look slightly spastic, I am quite happy about sharing a moment with so many people from around the world :)