Handmade Monday

It was my birthday last week, Hallowe'en, and yes, I am very old, thank you Hattie. We generally bring in cake and things on our birthdays, and as mine was in half term, I thought I'd do something a bit different. Also, I like to show off.

The traditional food of my "people" is generally pretty unsophisticated: meat, pies, stews (Potjiekos) and very, very sweet stuff like fridge cake, melktart, koeksisters and Malva pudding. It's good food, suitable for working on the land and easy to make in bulk to feed the five thousand.  I have a rather wonderful book that I rescued from the throwing out pile called "Meat on the Menu in Southern Africa", and it contains such gems as "Royal Hamburger Pie" and "Mint Glazed Carrots with Peas"; I will doubtless have a go at something from the book - maybe the Roast Venison.  First, shoot your buck.

Anyway.  Ouma gave me a recipe from our family archives a couple of years ago, and I love making it.  It is a fridge cake, and toe curlingly sweet, with half a pound of icing sugar and a big box of glace fruit in it.  It also has a entire block of butter, and three partially cooked eggs, as well as Marie biscuits and desiccated coconut. It is entirely delicious, and very, very bad for you.  I used one of my precious boxes of Moir's Glace Fruits, including glace pineapple with a cherry in the middle, and unidentifiable green stuff.  I'm not going back to Cape Town for the foreseeable, so I'll have to get it sent to me from now on, along with the Provita and the Peppermint Crisps.

Great Aunt Nellie's Fridge Cake

Chop up a lot of glace fruit, measure out 450g of icing sugar, 450g of coconut, and smash up a packet of biscuits - if you can't find Marie biscuits, plain biscuits like Rich Tea should be OK.

Melt a 250g block of butter in a pan, adding three well beaten eggs to it in order to partially cook them.  (At this point, I could feel Ouma standing beside me, poking me for not turning the heat off or beating the eggs before chucking them into the melted butter, resulting in a bit of a scrambled egg mixture - hem)

Put the icing sugar into the egg/butter mix.  Stir like crazy, then add the rest of the ingredients.  Pour into a flat dish, cut into small squares,  then put in the fridge for at least 12 hours.  If you line the dish with foil, it will make your life easier once it welds itself to the bottom.

Eat and try not to think of the calories.