A kind of food blog

This blog is for anyone who has never fried a sausage, baked a cake or boiled an egg.

The internet is awash with food blogs; You Tube channels, Instagram Reels, Pinterest Pins and TicTok Shorts on how to create, make and bake just about everything from baked ice cream to pigs trotter in a rich chardonnay sauce. Why would anyone bother with another one? This is the question I tortured myself with. Was I really going to try and teach Granny how to suck eggs or milk a duck? Has Granny not been sucking eggs since before I was born? This article is for people who never sucked an egg, can’t cook, won’t cook’ and like me don’t know the difference between a cup of flour and a glass of milk, this article is therefor for the baking illiterate, those of us who have never cracked an egg or whisked milk into a  delicate cream.

In The Beginning

In the beginning there was a cartoon themed box of bun mix on the baking self in one of those big multinational stores that employ psychologists to advise how best to ensnare toddlers and hold their attention (I think they call it product placement) while Mum or Dad seethe with frustration as they try to encourage their entrapped child to come with them to the next aisle. After several failed negotiation attempts and underhand bribes involving promises that they know they will never keep, Mum or Dad invariably give in and drop the Scooby and Shaggy bun mix into their basket.

This is exactly how my baking journey started. Dragging a screaming three year old away from her favourite cartoon canine isn’t an option.  I succumb to her demands, not because I have no resolve or backbone, it was Sunday and the store was about to close.

As I franticly picked my way through the frozen pizza’s looking for a peperoni special, the price and value of the Scooby buns suddenly dawned on me.  Almost £3 for a box of bun mix that makes as little as 10 sticky, sugary, E number infested fairy cakes (Not a good fairy) while a bag of self-rising flour at less than £1 could make up to 150 fairy cakes topped with whatever takes ones fancy, chocolate chip, icing in various colours, coconut flakes, cherries, sesame seeds or dried cranberries (Good fairy). I was determined to ditch Scooby in the unwanted items bucket and replace him with a bag of self-rising flour while my toddler was dizzily distracted by the brightly coloured ice-cream cartons, which had been conveniently placed at toddle eye level, for maximum impact, in the freezer next to the pizzas. God bless those product placement gurus for unwittingly assisting in my deception.

When we got home I felt a mixture of relief and guilt for having deceived my curly headed tot in such a sneaky and underhand way. These feelings were short lived as I soon realised that Scooby, like so many adorable puppy dogs before him, who have been acquired on a whim at Christmas or on a special birthday, was promptly forgotten in favour Noddy and the adventures of PC Plod. Need I remind you the reader, a dog is for life and not just a short term solution to a situation you have run out the energy to muster up a fair and plausible answer to.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you unpack the shopping there is often this one item that you set to one side and then forget about? Days later it is still where you left it. It has become something of a feature in the kitchen, like a cheap flower vase or a chipped tea cup you never get around to binning. The item seems to taunt you every time you pass it “I’m still here, I dare you to move me” I will soon, you think, but first I better cut the grass or change that light bulb in the garage. This exchange could go on for weeks if you let it with neither side gaining the upper hand. This could so easily have been the fate of my 1.5kg bag of flower. I am also mindful from past experience that if I put the flour in a cupboard it would most likely succumb to an even worse fate. It might sit in that dark vault and have other more appealing items placed in front of it never to be discovered again until its expiry date had passed and the golden packaging turned a sickly yellow.

I resolved there and then to grab the bull by the horns and make a tray of golden topped delights identical to those seen on the alluring packaging.

Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, flour alone will not make a cake. I sat myself down in Dr Google’s Master Chef Consultancy kitchen (My sofa) and invariably got lost in a labyrinth of recipes, measurements, temperatures, utensils and advertisements. By the time I surfaced from this caldron of information I had lost most of the afternoon, grown a six o’clock shadow and enabled my three year old to draw naive cave drawings along the length of the living room wall.

Who would have guessed that making a dozen or so buns could be such a contested and confusing issue? Arguments, suggestions, conflicting advice, information and disinformation flourish on the internet like mushrooms in a darkened room. There is Imperial, metric and American measurement to contend with. What is a cup of flour? Is it a china tea cup, a coffee cup or a builder’s mug? If 100grams are the same as 4oz why do they not square up on the scale? What is what the Americans call, all-purpose flour? Is it self-rising flour? Is it plain flour? Or is it a hybrid mix of the two? What is 356 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius? It starts to get really confusing when you get into the utensil end of things. A spatula is also known as a flipper, turner, maryse, scraper or spreader. I just wanted to bake a few buns for the wee one. I hadn’t planned on sitting an Open University degree in culinary arts. In the end I slammed my laptop shut, ignored any and all recipes with unnecessary extras like vanilla extract, milk, unsalted butter (as opposed to just butter) or baking powder. I just chucked two eggs, 100grams self-rising flour, 100grams of margarine (I wasn’t going to wait for butter to reach room temperature) 100grams of brown sugar (I had no caster sugar) into a bowl and mixed them altogether with the first thing I could find, poured the final mix into bun cases then flung the tray into the oven.

In the oven

It was like a mini miracle watching the buns rise accompanied by the smell of their sweet wholesome aroma. It was an even greater miracle to watch my toddler devour four of my golden, slightly misshapen, delights one after the other then fight me for the last one on the plate with a ruthlessness I had only ever seen exhibited by animals in the wild or by revellers on a Saturday night out in Belfast city centre. 

This was my baptism into the world of baking. Since this first tray of misshaped buns I’ve gone on to make a sponge cake that resembled a flat cap, a brown loaf that could easily be mistaken for a brick, an apple tart that went straight in the bin and a variety of tray bakes that looked less appealing than a box of dog biscuits.

As a result of my many trials and tribulations I have developed my own unique method of bun making which I call the “One, One, One, Two, chuck them in - that will do” method. This involves chucking a 100g self-rising flour, 100g sugar, 100g butter or margarine and two eggs into a bowl, mixing them until you hand is sore or when the mixture has a reached a batter like consistency. The next step is to spoon them in to bun cases, if you don’t have any bun cases spill the mixture into a dish lined with grease proof paper or tin foil (when they are done you can cut them into attractive shapes). Pop them in a pre-heated oven at 180c if you have a fan oven reduce this to 160c and bake for 18 minutes. When the oven beeps, or you iphone rings out an alarm, take the buns or the slab depending on whether or not you remembered to buy cases (Or read my tutorial on how to make your own) and empty them on a wire rack or a plate or whatever you have and leave them to cool down before you’ve decided what to do with them. I usual eat them one after the other, then fall into a well-earned deep, deep sleep.

The One, One, One, Two Method

Preparation

Check that you have a working oven

Check if it is gas or electric

Check if temperature dials are in Celsius, Fahrenheit or Gas mark

Pre-heat to 170c – Gas mark 3 Fahrenheit

Check you have a bun tray (Don’t be put off, see pic's below)

Check you have bun cases (Don’t be put off , see pic's below)

You will need:

Weighing scales (Don’t be put off if you don’t have a set of scales, see pic's below)

A bowl for mixing

A spoon of some sort to stir the mix

Tin foil (Just in case)

Bun cases (See pic's below on how to make your own)

Ingredients:

100g =4oz self-rising flour (About a third of a mug, see pic's)

100g =4oz Sugar (Less than a third of a mug)

100g =4oz butter or margarine (See guide on wrapper, see pic's)

2 medium eggs

Method:

Chuck all the ingredients in the bowl, remembering to crack the eggs into a separate bowl first so as not to get any egg shell in the mix.

Mix and slowly stir until all the ingredients have combined. Then stir more rapidly until you have a batter like consistency

Spoon the mix into 12 bun cases or your homemade cases, or spread the mix evenly into a flat tray

Pop in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes

Take the buns out of the oven and set on a wire rack. If you don’t have a wire rack, use a plate or a chopping board

When cool, eat and enjoy!

Handy Tips

Add something into the mix, whatever you can find; jelly tots, raisins, seeds, nuts, pieces of chocolate.

Dust the tops of the buns when they have cooled down with icing sugar.

Top the buns with icing. Empty some icing sugar into a bowl and add a very little amount of hot water and stir until it becomes thick paste. If it’s too runny it might not set.

Stick a smartie, or whatever you have, into the icing.

When you get confident at your bun making you can think about adding coco power or drinking chocolate into the mix to transform the buns into chocolate buns. You can add cinnamon powder to give your buns that sweet cinnamon flour or coffee to add a little continental flavour.

However you choose to make your buns and whatever you choose to add to the mix, baking should be fun and enjoyable. Don’t get too hung up if you make a mistake, that’s all part of the fun. Remember bun rhymes with fun and fun rhymes with buns!

One,one,one two method in Pictures

Make your own bun cases

Measurement

Chuck the ingredients in

Voila