Week 49: Family recipe #52Ancestors in 52Weeks

My friends and family know I enjoy baking. I grew up watching my mum baking every week. She baked for the family, of course, but she also baked for the church, for the bowling club and even for my own school events when I was a teacher. She seemed to love producing cakes, cupcakes, traybakes, pies.. not just a few a a time, but dozens - enough to fill a baker's wooden tray.

She had worked in a baker's shop before she got married and her own mother, my grandmother, had had a love of baking too. It was something that obviously got passed on to her and then to me. I remember that every Hallowe'en, she would bake a 'clootie dumpling' - a steamed fruit 'pudding' wrapped in cloth. Inside the dumpling she would have wrapped small coins or trinkets in grease proof paper and it was always great fun to see if the slice that was cut for you had a wrapped coin in it. Nowadays that would contravene 'Health and Safety'!

For Christmas too, she would bake her Christmas cake. A heavy fruit cake, covered in marzipan and royal icing spread to look like snow. On top there would always be a selection of Christmas figurines. Although as a child I loved the cake, I would always have left the marzipan and the hard icing from my piece for my dad to eat.

I can remember the Christmas she got her Kenwood Chef food mixer from Santa! I think that would have been in 1965. With the whisk for 'eggless' sponges, the K beater, the dough hook and a magical thing called a liquidiser, I think it must her been her favourite Christmas present ever.

But for all that my mum passed down her love of baking, she didn't really pass down a family recipe for baking or for cooking. She did, however, pass down certain phrases like 'half fat to flour' for shortcrust pastry and '4 4 4 and 2' which stood for quantities of flour, sugar, butter and eggs to make sponges and cupcakes.

So today, I decided to bake too. At this very moment my Christmas cake is in the oven. It won't be a patch on hers, but it will still be good.

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