How baking cake can defeat maternal guilt

Wednesday seems to be turning into baking day in my life. The bread I’ve baked at the weekend usually runs out around now and so if the oven’s going to be on for bread purposes, I can use it as an excuse to save the environment and bake some cake.

I had rather over-ambitiously intended to bake not one but 2 today, to see us well in to next week. My plan was to bake the NYC crumb cake AND the lemon drizzle cake from Baked in America, and freeze at least half of each in lunchbox portions. Partly I couldn’t choose between which cake to bake, and partly I wanted to give myself a bit of a head start on next week because – oh, did I mention? I’m going to Venice for the weekend. Yes, that’s right. VENICE!! Just me and the Husband. I LOVE being nearly 40...

So, seeing as how I’m GOING TO VENICE for the weekend, I thought that if I could get ahead it would make the morning drudgery of the school lunch boxes next week easier. And also, by leaving behind oodles of cake – and a choice of cake no less - it would perhaps soothe the inevitable guilt I feel about leaving the children. Oh yes, I can look past the fact that they are excited beyond belief about another weekend in the charge of Allotment Junkie, the fact that the Husband and I have hardly seen each other for the last few weeks (since half term, in fact) in a  blur of trans-Atlantic junketing (him), Scout meetings (him), book club (me), blogging (me) and general life stuff, and the fact that, dammit all this is my longed for trip to Venice, the birthday treat to end all birthday treats – and feel the weight of maternal guilt. But I’ll do my best to throw it off, I promise...

Where was I anyway? Oh yes. The best place to be. Baking cake. In the end, I saw sense and what with bread, and supper, I decided to just make one cake. The Lemon Drizzle actually looks like something rather special, so I’m going to save that for next week (once I’ve recovered from my weekend. Did I mention I was going to Venice?), so NYC crumb cake it was.

A little fiddly this one – I fear I may have over mixed my crumbs, and there seemed to be an awful lot of butter and sugar disappearing in to it, but who am I to argue, especially when it turn out like this.

Beautifully plain cake, with a scrummy crunchy, thick, cinnamon-sugar crumb layer on top. I have to say I will cut it in to a lot more than 12 pieces, but it really is gorgeous, and none the worse for the fact that the required amount of sour cream turned out to be mostly sour cream topped up with basically all my left over yoghurt (some Greek, some plain and a little vanilla – I reduced the amount of vanilla extract accordingly) and a dollop of crème fraiche.

So I have enough cake in the house to feel that I can leave the children for the weekend, and the smell of the cinnamon topping is lingering delightfully in my kitchen.

Even if I wasn’t going to Venice for the weekend, I’d be a happy woman!