Raspberry almond cake

In other news, I got up this morning to find dry pasta scattered with a wilful paw all over the dining-room floor.

But! This is mainly significant of the fact that the pasta/parmesan/sage/whisky interface is a success. Even without the great wheel of parmesan to mix it in. I can see it becoming a signature dish.

Also, I bought extra-large satsumas in the market yesterday. These turn out to be indistinguishable from, um, oranges. *is impossibly naive*

And several of you asked how to make a raspberry almond cake, so here are your instructions:

1. Start with a recipe for apricot cake, and fail to find any fresh apricots.

2. Cream 175g of butter with the same of caster sugar. (If the butter's too cold, grate it. And try not to let the cat lick the grater.)

3. Beat a couple of eggs, and mix them in gradually. If anything wants to curdle, add a tablespoon of flour to stabilise it.

4. Fold in 175g of self-raising flour, and 100g of ground almonds.

5. Add a couple of tablespoons of milk, and a lot of raspberries. A lot. It might have been 300g. Actually it might have been more.

6. Dollop into a cake tin - mine was 22cm, non-stick, spring-form - and bake at gas mark 4 for an hour or so. Next time I might leave it a little longer.

Actually, next time I might add chocolate in some form or other. I know there are those among you who do not believe that chocolate makes everything better, but they are a heretic sect and we shun them. *shuns*

Oops

Okay, new rule: no more glass bowls in the fridge. Especially when containing luscious supper. One might, f'rexample, set them down on spilled lard, which might have chilled into a slippy stuff, thus causing the bowl to slide out of the fridge next time one opened the door and shatter on the kitchen floor...

Grr.

In other news, this has been one of Those Days. I have a lot of these, or possibly These: where I go into the Lit & Phil in the morning and write a thousand disciplined words and then head home, reckoning on a 2K day at least. And drift through the countless retail opportunities on the way, and faff around with e-mail and late lunch and an episode of Buffy, and then go shopping at the supermarket, and come home and busy myself with mincing a kilo of pork and making poor-man's chorizo (in tupperware, in the fridge) and baking pork scratchings and boiling rice and cleaning up the mess of broken bowls and emptying the garbage and tidying the kitchen and and and, and almost nothing more gets written at all except the odd blog post. Sigh. Can I blame the cats?