Monthly Archives: October 2022

This one made it to print

Soft bickies

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, December 22, 2021

This is it, that’s my last column from last year. And what a year it was.

Yep, I’m ending the year with another recipe.

This one came about earlier this month, when I was trying to get into the Christmas spirit by baking and force feeding my artificial cheer to my long-suffering colleagues. I started off making a shortbread based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe from How to Eat because it called for 100 grams of butter and I only had 100 grams of butter left in the house. I knew it was 100 grams because of those helpful notches on the packaging.

It was a very unusual and quite alarming situation for me to be in because I typically have at least half a kilo of butter on hand – and that’s on top of the slab of butter ready for action in my butter dish. I don’t understand how I got to this crisis point or why I didn’t do something to address the issue before things got so dire, but I had to play with the cards I’d been dealt.

I was committed to and excited about following a recipe to the letter for a change – I even made sure I used the exact amount of sugar. The recipe was in grams and I don’t have a set of kitchen scales so I had to look up how many cups 50 grams of icing sugar filled. It turned out that I needed a quarter of a cup and one tablespoon of the stuff. And even though I could have just gone with a heaped quarter cup measurement, I broke out the tablespoon measurement, dirtying two measuring vessels just to ensure I had the correct amount. I was going By The Book and I was very smug about it…

…then I realised I had no cornflour and the recipe didn’t call for the egg I’d taken out of the fridge earlier to come to room temperature. So rather than sourcing cornflour or putting the egg back in the fridge, I decided to once again go off-road, recipe-wise. 

And this is what I did in case you want to copy:

I creamed 100 grams (or five tablespoons) of very, very soft butter with six tablespoons of sifted icing sugar (yes, I measured it out in tablespoons to save excess washing up in the future) with an electric mixer.

Then I added a few drops of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of cinnamon and mixed it together. 

I thought that I’d stay as true to the recipe as possible and thought I’d just add the egg yolk to the mix instead of the whole egg. 

I then looked up how many cups 100 grams of plain flour was in cups. When I say it was half a cup and two tablespoons I thought, “meh, let’s just go a whole cup and be done with it”. I made sure to sieve it though because even though I was being reckless with my baking, I wasn’t going to be sloppy. There’s no excuse for lumps of flour.

It was at this point I realised that I wouldn’t be finding a use for that egg white within a timely manner decided I may as well just use it. And since I’d already dirtied an extra tablespoon measurement, I may as well create more washing up so I decided to whisk it until it was the consistency of thickened cream (I could have gone harder but I grew impatient). 

And then I whisked about a tablespoon of this leftover jammy cherry butterscotch sauce I had sitting in the fridge into the egg white, creating a greyish mix that looked like the scum you’d skim off the top of the wastewater in a sullage pit.

I then mixed this into the dough with the electric beater, therefore cancelling out all the work I’d done trying to get air into the whites (I made this recipe again by just cracking in the egg and adding a tablespoon of jam and it was pretty much the same thing so all of this faffing was very much for nothing, but did make me feel like a serious baker).

I then wrapped the dough in cling wrap and chilled it in the fridge for about half an hour, while I halved the leftover cherries in my fridge. 

I then rolled the dough into tiny balls, pushed one cherry half into each mound and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. 

I then baked them at 160 degrees for 20 minutes and presented them to my colleagues.

I was later congratulated on how soft the bickies were, as if that softness was something I purposefully set out to achieve. Considering my last bickie offering was described as a jaw workout, I’ve decided to chalk this up as a win.  

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This one did not

Getting the timing right

Originally published by the Clifton Courier, December 15

We have very precise ways of measuring time, but that doesn’t mean we’re all that precise about it in practice. 

I mean, I often like to jokingly chime that “time is just a social construct, mahn!” but, at the same time, there’s no denying that time, you know, goes by. And the social construct of time and the shared understanding we all have of it is what keeps this society of ours ticking along in at least a somewhat orderly fashion. 

We humans no longer have to rely on the rooster’s first crow or the curlew’s evening call to be a marker of time (although there’s some romance to meeting your secret lover just beyond the tree line after the evening birdsong sounds, it would be quite another thing to try to schedule a doctor’s appointment around that). 

We’ve got these sweet new gizmos called clocks. 

And while they now come in many forms – the grandfather clock that’s too heavy to move, a smartwatch and a microwave clock that you’re too lazy to synchronise but you know how many hours ahead it is so you do some quick maths to get a rough idea of the time (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything…) – we all generally tick to the same tock, if you catch my drift.  

But just because we’ve got clocks, doesn’t mean this whole shared concept of time runs like clockwork. That only happens when we’re all clear on what time a specific time actually is. 

Obviously when someone says “seven o’clock”, we all know what that means. 

But when you’re a little looser with your language, it no longer comes down to the standard increments of seconds, minutes and hours, it comes down to individual assumptions and expectations. And we’re not always ticking and tocking in tune on that front. 

For example, the other day I received a message from a friend advising me about a meeting which required my attendance. 

The exact wording of the message was “PSA. Bowls club this afternoon 4ish”. 

I’d received that message at 2.41pm, shortly after I’d finished work for the day. I decided that timeframe would give me enough time to get home, put on a load of washing, have a quick nap and trot on over. 

Because, to me, “4ish” is a very fluid term. And, when I think about it now, it’s all about context.  

If it were a “4ish” on a Monday afternoon in early February at a fancy venue that gets busy quickly and requires a reservation, I’d have applied a much tighter window of time around 4pm in which I’d arrive. 

But because it was a Sunday afternoon in the pointy end of the year at a bowls club where people walk around with no shoes on and there’s always a seat, I thought the window was much, much wider. 

There was no set time by which I had to arrive, so I felt that whenever I rocked up would be the right time. Not early, not late, but roughly just on time. 

So I didn’t set myself an exact time I was aiming to arrive by. I’d just turn up when I turned up, I thought. I didn’t expect to be the first person there, but I wasn’t expecting to be the last either.

When I did turn up, five people were already there, some of them onto their second beers. One person had already ordered a round of calamari rings.

And the sender of the “4ish” message raised the question about what “4ish” actually meant to people. She wanted to know what we thought was an acceptable time for someone to turn up either side of the hour the “ish” was applied to. She wanted specifics. 

One person said “ish” covered half-an-hour before and an hour after the hour in question. 

Another said ten minutes before and ten minutes after.

Another said there was no time before, because otherwise they’d say something like “turn up a bit before 4pm” 

Forced to get specific, I said it was half-an-hour before or half-an-hour after.

I hadn’t taken note of the time it was when I arrived, so I assumed that my appearance fell into my window of acceptability. 

Turns out I walked in at 4.33pm, so I was officially late. 

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