A treacle sponge
from outside the comfort zone
The thing with BLISS
and DLL is this: I live a lot of my life in the dock...
DREAM SEQUENCE
THE KITCHEN DRIFTS
IN AND OUT OF FOCUS UNTIL THE BLURRED IMAGES SLOWLY SHARPEN
BLISS SITS AT THE
TABLE, BE-WIGGED AND BEGOWNED. DLL STRIDES AROUND, HANDS GRASPING THE
LAPELSOF HER BARRISTER'S GOWN. ISTVAN STANDS IN THE CORNER, CLUTCHING
A TEA TOWEL.
DLL: I put it to
you, Istvan, that you are trying to cobble together some sort of
desert with neither the knowledge, the know-how, the qualifications
nor the experience to be attempting any such endeavour.
ISTVAN: Eh?
BLISS: The accused
will answer the question.
ISTVAN: Yes, your
Ma'am-ness. What was the question again?
DLL: I'll try
another approach, as, clearly, you are struggling, Mr Fallok, with my
previous line of questioning. Where did you get the recipe from?
ISTVAN: [Points to
the diagram of a pot within a pot, water levels and suchlike he'd
drawn] er...from the Internet...
DLL: And who, pray,
is the source of said recipe?
ISTVAN: Dunno,
someone quoting Nigella?
DLL: Nigella? I rest
my case, your honour.
BLISS: How, sir,
does this boiling for two hours create a spong? What is the rising
agent? How were the ingredients mixed?
ISTVAN: Hold on, I
don't do puddings...look, I 'aint Fanny bloody Blumenthal-Craddock,
am I, I was just...
BLISS: Silence in
court. You are dangerously close to contempt here, Mr Fallok.
Confiscate his tea-towel and lock away the tinfoil.
BLUR THEN REFOCUS,
DREAM SEQUENCE ENDS
It didn't all go
according to plan. I wasn't sure if the lemon was waxed or unwaxed,
or whether that was really crucial, so I grated the rind (called the
'zest' by cake-folk, making what's usually thrown away sound like a
energetic resource, “have you seen my new car? Hybrid. Petrol and
lemon-zest powered engines”) into the mix until I was bored, about
halfway through the process, and topped it up with some drops of
lemon oil from a little plastic bottle on that shelf I'm not really
allowed on. Grating the outside of a lemon is truly up there with the
most boring things you can do.
I measured the stuff
out properly, despite my measuring phobia, partly because there was a
nice symmetry to things (6oz flour, 6 oz butter, 6 oz sugar), until
it came to the golden syrup. I'm not cleaning the scales out after
measuring 8 oz of that goo. I guessed how much of that to use.
It said soft butter.
I used the microwave and took “totally melted to liquid form” to
be a very sincere form of “softened”. I dropped the whole basin
into the boiling water towards the end of the process, but it didn't
seem to damage the outcome too much. After standing for a while, it
even looked like some of the photos on the Internet of what it's
meant to look like.
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