Belgium Cake

It's a beautiful day today after a night of heavy rains...and I get to work on my patio (thank God for laptops and wifi)...with my coffee... softly rustling-in-the-breeze heliconias serenading me...and my tomyam bubbling on the stove...and my three piles of unfolded laundry safely hidden away in my kids' room where I can't see it...ahhh...simple pleasures.

Out of sight out of mind. Like someone on a Moscow-Vienna-Qatar jaunt. Jetsetter la katakan...Lucky him. Different city every other few months. Far cry from our Kampung Pasir days eh? I hope she packed the right stuff. She obviously knows now she needs to know more than just fellatio to pack a man the right stuff for a trip. What some women do for money. Fellatio I mean. Or in her case, for more of it. Money I mean.

Maybe I will start/continue reading the 50 or more books I've been collecting lately... soon...in various stages of read (iness).

Now I gotta work to pay for more books to pile up and admire from afar...(I'm like Sherry. She has a bag and shoe fetish, I have a book fetish...)

Alamak...tomyam is no longer soupy.

Btw, squeezing the lime right before serving tastes so much better. And garnish with coriander. Coriander has one of the richest sources of vitamin A and C.

And I hope there's more of that Belgium Cake around...reminds me of mum. She was a fantastic cook (now she's older and forgetful), a complete "make-everything-herself" kinda girl. Jams, chili sauces, tauhu, fruit squash, malay kuih, etc2... even reared her own chickens smack in the middle of our dusun-like suburban house (didn't want any of that frankenstein junk they injected into commercial chickens getting into her kids...the neighbor caught behind our house complained about the smell, but she turned around and complained to the enforcement officers..."dia orang simpan anjing banyak2 lagi busuk! Ini ayam bela mau makan! Hehe...they couldn't argue with the boss)...she even rigged her own booby traps around our large compound after thieves broke in. But we got whacked instead playing around the house. Thieves feared coming in again. Ever. You don't mess with this woman. She is a survivor. Survived the Partition War. Survived many hardships.

Belgium Cake

1 lb flour
8 oz butter (softened)
2 oz sugar
vanilla
1 egg
Mixed fruit jam
Sugar colored blue and red and green or purple (I like purple)

Dump the flour, plain sugar, butter, beaten egg and vanilla together. Work it with your hands till it becomes a dough. Divide into two portion. Scrape half into a cake tin using this whatchamacallit (use the bigger holes), and lightly press down the scraped dough into the pan. Slather on a whole load of jam evenly, and scrape the other half of the dough on top. Press down lightly until firm and it doesn't come apart. Sprinkle the colored sugar over it and bake till lightly browned. Each layer should be about half an inch or more.

Cut into squares.

Sedap giler.

A kids' favorite to make and mine to eat. Kids just love playing with the dough. They don't really eat it because they know they lied or suddenly remembered that they picked their nose when I asked them if they washed their hands before...