Cooking and Pondering ..

I was baking cakes this afternoon. One for the cake tin and 3 for the freezer. I stopped baking a few months ago. I thought it would help me and my man lose weight. It didn't. Rather the opposite in fact. Extra fruit and/or choc biscuits have been eaten instead. So back to the baking - a slice of homemade wholewheat fruit cake will do us far more good. As it is I must cut back on the fruit. I have over indulged on fruit to the point last week I felt as if I had a bad case of fruit poisoning.
Today I have made the easy boiled cake - for recipe click here (trawl down to page8). I have few old, favourite, well tested recipes that I can make with my eyes shut. While the fruit was simmering away on the hob I nipped online to catch up on recent blog postings. I found Mopsa's on food glorious food . And from there to Flowerpot's article on eating out while people watching. Then I had to leave to go back to the kitchen to finish the cakes and get them into the oven. While I was stirring in the flour I remembered my school days. Domestic Science classes. We only did 2 years before we had to turn our young minds to study for the GCE O level's instead of practical lessons. We had 2 Domestic Science teachers; Mrs Russell and Mrs Nicholls. The first a homely, gentle warm cook - pink cheeked and plump. The second small, thin, sharp tongued and a bit peevish. We had the demonstration and explanation first and then we'd get on and make our own. I remember during 'How to Bake a Victoria Sandwich' us 30 girls being told that when stirring flour into our creamed egg, sugar and butter mixture ALWAYS to stir in a clockwise direction - then the flour will slowly fall from the side of the bowl and be incorporated into the mixture. To stir the wrong way and the flour would fail to fall gently into the mixture. I remember being much struck by this gem of information. I pondered why not anti-clockwise; could it be the way the spoon was shaped? what if you were left handed? and held the spoon in a different way? I must have opened my mouth to frame a question - took a deep breath and was told "Don't ask Penelope - I don't know why it is it just is!" So even at the age of 12 years I must have been wondering on the Why's and How's of Life. I do it still and some people join in and chew things over with me - some people just say "I never think of things that way". Just think, if my old school had been different I might have grown up with the answer to the question on Life, the Universe and Everything.