Bucketfuls of sweetish
dessert apples still left – these are turned into trays of an
amazing apple crumble cake, a German recipe with a light fluffy base
that really benefits from apple mush seeping in and which I adjust by
adding vanilla bean paste, ginger and cinnamon to the crumble. I
bring a tray of my latest oeuvre into work and am absurdly pleased
when one colleague, who's just returned to work after a long illness,
pronounces it “the best apple cake” he's ever eaten (I do like a
bit of hyperbole).
I also experiment with
my pear windfalls: here I try an upside-down pear caramel tart, very
nice, very sweet, and a, to me, spectacular pear-cardamom cake, which
I could sit in all day, and also a moist pear chocolate cake that is
incredibly gooey in the middle. I keep some back for the household
and take the rest into work, plonk the tray on the table in the
middle of the office and wait until the end of the day. Not a
crumb left. Okay!
During my baking
experiments after work, I often put Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's
River Cottage series on the laptop (see above) as gently nutty
background noise. In one of the programmes he says you should harvest
pears before they're actually ripe and allow them to ripen inside.
There's at least a ton of pears still hanging on the top branches of
our one pear tree down the bottom of the garden and I have no way of
getting to them. So I go online and order a fruit picker with a 3-m
extendable pole off a London-based online garden centre. A week
passes and nothing has arrived. Or even shipped. My pears are
dripping from the tree, detonating syrupily on the ground. I give it
two more weeks, still nothing. Then I send a kindly worded email to
ask what may be holding up the order. I'm told it's an item that has
nothing to do with the fruit picker so I cancel it. Good news though:
the axe with the massive handle can be delivered alongside. I've
forgotten why I ordered an axe with a massive handle at the time:
we've still not got our wood-burning stove because we're terrified of
the expense, and any wood that's on our property has already been
painstakingly sawn into very small pieces by me during one of my
periodic destructive episodes. It was probably down to my having read
Max Brook's Zombie Handbook, the current reading matter in the
downstairs loo, and it does say in it that an axe is very useful in a
zombie attack. If anything, you can retreat upstairs and chop up your
staircase very quickly so that the zombies, who can't climb, have to
wander around downstairs and moan while you're upstairs, in relative
safety, provided you've stored your allotment provisions in the
attic. Which we will.
The fruit picker
arrives eventually when all the pears have either dropped to the
ground or rotted on the branch. The axe is very impressive. It
reaches up to my hip. If I swing that, I'll take out at least 3
zombies and my own leg.
One other thing also
arrived this month: our new chest freezer. Unfortunately, there's
only room for it in the pantry under the stairs, so getting to it
will be a problem if the zombies attack or the sea levels rise and we
flood. OH points out that if any of my anticipated scenarios ever
come to pass, we'd be more likely to strap our portable belongings
into our new Chinese-built bicycle trailers and get the hell out of
Dodge, than worrying about what's left in the freezer, and while we
are on the subject, when am I finally assembling my trailer, which is
still in its original packaging?
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