I drove Bert and Ray to the park after lunch, parked, after some difficulty finding a space, and opened the back car door. Ray sprinted, panting, to the park entrance nearest the children’s playground and Bert dillied and dallied, climbing into the driving seat and steering aggressively.
‘Quick!’ I said, ‘Ray’s already run in. There are children in there! He might scare them.’
(Ray always comes off in my blog as a disturbing, sweaty uncle but is in fact our dog, who has the spirit of a disturbing, sweaty uncle.)
‘You parked badly,’ he explained, ‘so I had to do it for you.’ He threw a patronising, toothy smile over his shoulder and screeched to an imaginary halt.
We had friends over this morning. The adults ate this and the children used icing as glue to stick sugar eyes, sugar carrots, hundred and thousands and mini marshmallows to biscuits – seven small children got through 15 biscuits, 12 sugar carrots and 53 sugar eyes and probably all did a little swivel-eyed backseat driving this afternoon.
Any cake serves as many as want it
125g soft butter
175g golden caster sugar
3 medium eggs
1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon almond essence
125g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
45g ground almonds
125ml plain yoghurt
125g halved and stoned cherries tossed in 1/2 tablespoon of flour – supposedly stops the fruit sinking, but didn’t in this case. Call it a fruit layer cake and don’t apologise.
Preheat the oven to 180 and line a 2lb loaf tin, or a smaller loaf tin if you want deeper slices.
Cream the butter and sugar together well – till pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating the mixture well each time. Add the almond essence with the last egg. Fold in, carefully, the flour, baking powder, almonds and yoghurt, then gently stir through the cherries.
Bake for 40-50 minutes, till golden, springy to the touch and coming away from the sides.
It would be nice drizzled with glacé icing, but we had it plain.