Coffee Rum Gateau

I need to introduce myself as Coffee rum gateau. I am named after a dessert my mother use to make in the 70’s, which you can see in this faded 70’s picture from my mother’s cookbook. I remember the cake so well that it seems part of the landscape of my childhood. When I started to think about it again, some 20 or so years later, looking back in my mother’s cookbook I found it didn’t look like I remember. That’s because my mother had altered the recipe and shaped it into her own. First of all she called it gateau, rather than cake, because this was the seventies, the height of the dinner party and my mother wanted to impress, which she did with this cake. Also, rather than those rather poor looking walnuts on top of the gateau, which you see in the picture, my mother got a Cadbury’s flake, I still remember the fantastic seventies flake wrapper, and shred it all over the top of the coffee rum gateau, which would render me speechless with excitement and expectation about when I would get my choppers around a piece of it. When she used to make this cake I must have been around 7-8 years old. I would be drawn into the kitchen by the smell of my mums baking. I seem to remember I was always at her right hand side, not blocking the light coming in from the kitchen window, just watching, taking it all in, from the mixing together of the raw ingredients through to the cooking of the cake in the oven and the final stage of decoration prior to the doorbell ringing and friends of my parents coming round for dinner. If a cake like this formed a big part of my growing up that must mean there is some comfort in it for me. I guess this is true. It is also true because cooking formed a large part of my family life as I grew up and still does for my parents. The strange thing is that as I have started to write about my family and cooking I have started to cook myself. For years all cooking utensils have lain unused in my kitchen, waiting for the moment when I set them to use and now I have started cooking, I can’t stop. It’s like all those years I thought I was no good at baking I have realised that wasn’t true and I can do it. There has been an explosion in my kitchen and cakes and brownies and cookies are all floating down onto my kitchen work surfaces. I will fill you in with what I have been cooking as the days go by. First let me scan on the recipe for coffee rum gateau, which I will make for myself, for the first time over the next few weeks. I don’t think I will make it this week because the stomach needs a rest but you never know, I will keep you posted. This week I will be making summer pudding, one of the dishes my Grandma use to make.