Z Goes a bit Overboard

In this country, it's Mothering Sunday tomorrow, which is treated as Mother's Day is everywhere else, even, erroneously, in most churches (okay, Dave?).  So we're starting our service with coffee and cakes and a craft for children - they will make and decorate little boxes, which they can then fill with chocolates, which will be provided.  Then we'll move into the church for a short service, then the chocolates and posies of flowers will be handed out at the end.

I'm on the rota to do coffee tomorrow.   However, I asked a friend if she'd make a cake too, and when we arrived to set up everything ready for tomorrow, another friend had brought along small cakes for the children.  This afternoon, I have made a fruit cake and a carrot cake and I'm just going back to the kitchen in a few minutes to make a chocolate sponge cake.  I rang my friend to ask what cake she had made.  "I've made a jam sandwich (that's a Victoria sponge, darlings, not bread and jam) and a fruit cake.  Oh, and I made some date slices".

We're going to have enough cake to feed at least 100 hungry people (we'll have fewer than half that at the service I expect, although we're preparing in other respects for 60).  I normally make cake, reluctantly, about twice a year.  It's all this cooking that the Sage is doing - I can't move into his territory of cooking delicious (if rather meat-based) dinners, so I'm having to do a whole lot of baking instead.

I've never tried this carrot cake recipe before, but I have eaten it.  About 15 years ago, at the Middle School fete, I bought a cake from a stall that a friend had made.  It was delicious and I told her so, and she said she had made it from the Food Aid recipe book which had been published not long before.  "I have that book, I'll have to give the recipe a go," I said.

Now I have.