Right, where were we? Ah yes, er, June.
A lot has happened since then, though apparently none of it worth blogging. For one thing, I helped successfully deliver both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Then I had a brief three-week stint at home on the boat at the end of August, which was lovely. I met my new next-boat-neighbour Tim, and managed to repaint the roof of the boat (which really, really needed it), and went another round with the boat engine. For the record, despite replacing the starter battery, glow plugs, ignition switch, and glow plug wiring, the engine will still not start. A whole new starter motor has now been acquired and is sitting in the box tucked away until I find the heart to resume the struggle.
On the plus side, the various repairs required me to buy a hydraulic crimping tool! (Pause for sotto vocce "oooooohhhhhs!" from tool geeks and "huuuuuhhhs??" from everyone else.)
And then, all too soon, it was off to the next job. This was, bizarrely, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The event was the opening show for the 2022 Riyadh Season, which I will describe here with Wikipedian exactitude as "a state-sponsored annual entertainment and sports festival". Life in Riyadh was... fine. No, really. Things have relaxed a lot there in the last few years. Women no longer have to wear the abaya in public - as long as your shoulders and knees are covered, you're good. And there was no requirement for a "male guardian" to accompany me if I went out. Not that I went out. The work was busy enough that there wasn't much opportunity. I didn't run either, because while there was a gym with treadmills in the hotel, the hours were segregated by gender and - unsurprisingly - the women's hours were decidedly inconvenient. (Call me crazy, but a brisk 5k on the treadmill at 9:30pm was not appealing.)
I did get out of the city once, and saw a bit of the "desert" which was much rockier than the Lawrence of Arabia sweeping sand dunes sort of thing you're probably expecting.
Oh yeah, there was also ten-day break in the middle of that whole thing wherein I flew back to the UK to meet Karen for a vacation we'd been planning long before the notion of Saudi Arabia reared its head.
Guess where we were? (Also, what is that slightly crazed expression on my face??)
Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will recall that Parkin is a traditional gingerbread cake associated with Bonfire Night and usually found in the north of England, especially Yorkshire. It features lots of butter and sugar, mostly in the form of golden syrup and black treacle. And I suppose because it's from The North it's also got a good measure of oatmeal. Butter, sugar, golden syrup, treacle, oatmeal... sounds a lot like flapjacks. Sadly... not. (Oooooohh! Foreshadowing!)
We've talked about Golden Syrup before on the blog (though let's face it, it's been ten years, we've talked about pretty much everything on the blog) but haven't touched on treacle yet, beyond a vague threat to blog about treacle tart. So... treacle is basically the British equivalent to molasses. It's a by-product of refining sugar created when sugar cane or sugar beets are boiled down until the sugar crystallises, at which point the crystals are removed to become sugar and the remaining syrup goes on to become molasses or treacle. In both cases, the darkness of the resulting syrup depends on how long the liquid is boiled. Molasses tends to be boiled longer, resulting in a darker syrup, whereas treacle is usually lighter. Unless, however, you're dealing with black treacle, which is very black indeed.
All this is to say that North American AGSPWL readers who want to try this recipe would probably be just fine substituting molasses for the black treacle and corn syrup for the golden syrup.
I decided to use the recipe from BBC Good Food website, maybe because it's the BBC, and maybe because I use the BBC Good Food Roast Timer whenever I roast a chicken and it has never failed me.
Unlike a traditional sponge cake where you might start by creaming together butter and sugar, this parkin started by melting all the good stuff in a saucepan and then adding the flour, raising agents and liquids. I also decided to spice things up a bit by adding a small amount of freshly grated ginger root, because I figured it's gingerbread, right?
Things were looking and smelling great when the parkin went into the oven, and even better when it came out an hour later. I was worried it might not be cooked through, since the recipe called for a 9" cake pan, and mine was 8". However, the old toothpick in the middle trick confirmed that all was cooked through, so out it came to cool.
I looked at a few different recipes for parkin before settling on the BBC one, and they all had small variations. However, they all agreed on one point: this is a cake that improves with time. Every recipe I read said that you should make parkin up to a week before you want to eat it because it gets softer and stickier the longer it sits.
I know that not everyone who reads this blog has met me personally (I estimate that only about 85% of you have). But even if you haven't, you may have picked up on a slight tendency I have towards impatience. So it will likely not surprise any Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Reader to learn that the notion of baking an entire cake and then NOT TOUCHING IT FOR A WEEK was simply not a thing that was going to happen on this blog.
And how was it? This warm, spicy gingerbread cake that smelled so lovely and came with such a beguilingly seasonal back story?
Meh.
It was a bit dry. Pleasant enough, but certainly nothing to write a blog about. "Ok", I thought. "I guess they weren't kidding about the waiting thing." So I wrapped up the remaining 15/16ths of the cake tightly and set it aside. And then, in a supreme triumph of willpower wherein I shared the exceedingly tight confines of my 200 square foot boat with almost an entire cake, I DID NOT TOUCH the parkin for DAYS. About three days later I unwrapped it to check for the promised soft-and-stickiness. Not much appeared to have changed, but I had a piece anyway.
Meh.
And now, as I write this fully a week after baking, the parkin remains the same sorta dry, slightly crumbly, decidedly unsticky thing it was when it emerged from the oven seven days ago. Maybe I overbaked it? Maybe I didn't wrap it tightly enough for the magical stickifying effect to happen? Maybe I picked the wrong recipe. For instance, this one comes with whisky caramel sauce, which I suspect would make a massive difference. Or maybe Big Parkin has just been perpetuating this myth of stickiness for centuries. It's not inedible by any means. It's still cake, after all. Let's just say it's no Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding and leave it at that.
So parkin was a bit of a bust, though it's not like every other GRUB! post has all been an unalloyed success either (Welsh Rarebit, I'm looking at you). So in the interests of completeness, I'm giving you the recipe here. Because it's entirely possible I just didn't do it right and someone else could turn this into the soft and sticky delight I was promised (Karen?).
Go Stay Work Play Live Parkin (taken in its entirety from the BBC Good Food Website)
Ingredients:
200g butter
1 large egg
4 tbsp milk
200g golden syrup (or corn syrup)
85g black treacle
85g brown sugar
100g rolled oats
250g (2 cups) flour
1 tbsp ground ginger
half a thumb grated fresh ginger (this was entirely my addition)Heat the oven to 160C / 325F / Gas Mark 3 (In retrospect this This seems quite low. Gas mark 3? Maybe I dehydrated this cake instead of baking it?)
Line a 9" square cake tin with baking parchment.
Beat the egg and milk together.
In a saucepan, melt the butter, syrup, treacle and sugar together until the sugar dissolves. Turn off the heat and mix in the oatmeal, flour and ginger, followed by the egg and milk.
Pour the batter into the tin and bake 50 - 60 minutes, until the cake feels firm and a little crusty on top. Cool in the tin and then wrap in more parchment and foil. Keep for up to five days before eating if you can - it'll become softer and sticker the longer you leave it, up to two weeks.
Suuuuuure it will.
