things fall apart.

so, things have not been very good at casa mitchell this week. the usual family dramas, reopening of old wounds, and me sinking back into my role as introspective and silent eldest daughter like something straight out of virginia woolf. it's not a place i like to be, or a place that many people who see my day-to-day personality imagine me being, but it is a place i end up a lot, when i'm under the same roof as my family. part of it is because i can understand how all the things that make me myself are very disappointing to my parents. no self-respecting suburban (albeit divorced) pair want to raise a literary, liberal, vegetarian gender theorist who refuses to have sensible hair. that doesn't mean i'm any less proud of myself for what i've achieved, but it does mean i'm sometimes called upon to walk on eggshells and furiously negotiate everything internally before i say it. it's just how things are. families, who'd have them?

i'm not sure how far i'd go in my adherence to the like water for chocolate school of thinking about cooking; the idea that how you feel is imparted into what you make, but there are a few instances in my cooking life that have led me to wonder if it can, sometimes be the case (incidentally said book is quite an interesting female take on latin american magical realism, worth a read, for those interested in such things). these are instances where i have monumentally fucked up. or at least, something has. everyone experiences those moments in cooking where the magic just will not happen, and the more you try and the more frustrated you get, the worse you make things. they just seem to happen to me on what are already pretty horrible days where everything else goes completely tits up as well.

i feel, in some ways, that writing about this particular mistake is going to bring me serious relief. at the moment i have a lot of friends who have just started cooking; and while i appreciate them coming to me for advice; they seem to be on the dangerous verge of viewing me as infallible in the kitchen. i don't think it's healthy to strive to be or learn from anybody who never fucks up or never admits to it, which is why at university i preferred cynical broken marxists, and why in the kitchen i prefer almost documentary writers like mr. slater, who will freely admit to disastrous combinations and what-was-i-thinking moments? although, perversely enough i did use a nigel slater recipe for tuesday's kitchen disaster, which i have slightly rewritten here because i do everything by hand and nigel slater takes the machine approach to his cakes a lot of the time. so, from the kitchen diaries comes:

frosted marmalade cake (also known as 'oh my god what the fuck happened to that?!)

butter, 175g
golden unrefined caster sugar, 175g
a large orange
eggs, 3 large
orange marmalade, 75g (note here i am using my orange and glenturret home made)
self-raising flour, 175g

for the frosting:
icing sugar, 100g
orange juice, 2 tablespoons

set the oven at 180 degrees c/gas 4. line a loaf tin about 25 x 11 cm and 7cm deep. cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. finely grate the orange. break the eggs into a small bowl and beat lightly with a fork. beat the eggs into the butter and sugar a little at a time, then beat in the marmalade and the grated orange zest.

fold in the flour firmly but carefully with a large metal spoon. this may take a while. lastly, gently stir in the juice of half the orange. spoon the mixture into the lined tin, lightly smoothing the top . bake for forty minutes, checking it after thirty-five with a metal skewer. leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.

sift the icing sugar and mix it to a smooth, runny consistency with as much of the remaining orange juice as it takes, probably just under two tablespoons. drizzle the icing over the cake, letting it run down the sides, and leave to set.

okay so i can already hear everyone thinking 'that seems like an easy recipe, what the hell went wrong?'. well, guys, this is what went wrong:

just....look at it. there was much countertop slamming and swearing afoot in my kitchen that afternoon. combined with panicky texts to ed varying in drama levels. what went wrong was i decided, rather than use the bane of my existence fan assisted main oven, to use the top oven. which then proceeded to unleash fury on the top of my cake. it would have been worse if i hadn't covered the top with foil.

(also, to those of you wondering exactly what the fuck my loaf tin is and why it's bright orange; it's silicone, i got it from a denby/le creuset outlet shop in gunwharf quays, portsmouth, along with several other silicone pieces, that i now refuse to be without in baking as they minimize the need for tin-lining thus earning me a fair few green points given how often i bake.)

still, nobody puts mitchell in a corner, not even a charcoal topping on a cake. and everything else in my day had started to go so downhill that this cake became a grudge point. i'm currently ill-advisedly reading a jonathan franzen during a time of family conflict, and he often uses his character's interactions with food to show what they're feeling. there's a bit in the corrections where an angry father fights with a barbecue in the rain and serves the most hilariously/tragically strained attempt at a mixed grill to his family while they're all silently against him. this cake was, by this point, that kind of metaphor. i cut off the top with a breadknife, increasingly frustrated in my efforts so that gentle sawing verged on manic hacking, turned the whole thing over, and proceeded to make my icing. i say icing, slater is being a bit disingenuous here i feel (especially by using the american term for their excessive take on cake decoration; frosting), it's more of a glaze. a sort of slightly-more-present take on the drizzle stage of a lemon drizzle. it ended up looking like this:

(note, the white squiggles were of some random writing icing i found, and put on in an attempt to buy time before answering a particularly loaded and painful question from my mother). basically then, the ugliest cake in the world. it's a good job, and this came as a shock even to me, that it tasted so good. i believe ed mentioned the questionable size of the shred in this particular marmalade (i blame blunt knives), but that they are possessed of enough give that it doesn't matter so much. they provided a sticky, almost fudgy sweetness in relation to the fresh zest and juice, and the effect was excellent. this cake needs it's icing-it's very moist and the thin crackle and sharp taste of the juice in it provide a good contrast. i was quite pleased that although hideous to behold, the cake at least granted me the pride-saver of actually being good.

i am contemplating making a lemon version with my honey and lemon marmalade, but this time? i'll use the fan assisted oven.