Baking for boyfriends

I’m no surrendered woman but I can’t deny that I get a shocking amount of pleasure out of baking treats for my boyfriend. The idea of being the little wife in the kitchen goes against all my feminist principles but still I can’t seem to stop. I blame Nigella.

It might also have something to do with the fact that my boyfriend and I live quite far apart and sometimes it can be a couple of weeks before we get to see each other. When I do visit him often I feel the need to have some kind of sweet offering - maybe to remind him why he loves me (shallow, I know, but it seems to work).

This week has been so cold I’ve been able to see my breath inside my flat, so something warming was needed. It was the perfect opportunity to try out a lemon and ginger fridge-cake recipe I’ve had my eye on for a while. OK, I know a fridge-cake isn’t particularly warming, it was more the lemon and ginger that grabbed me.

The recipe is ridiculously easy - chop 60g of crystallised lemon peel and 60g of crytallised ginger, blend with 200g of crunchy ginger biscuits and grate in the rind of one lemon. Then squeeze the lemon into a saucepan and simmer until it’s reduced to about one tablespoon-worth. Melt in 80g of butter then pout the lemony buttery liquid into the biscuit mix, stir it all together, press into a shallow cake tin and put in the fridge to set.

Catherine Mason, whose excellent recipe this is, suggests serving the cake with strong espresso. I don’t know about that but I found the baking process was helped along nicely by a large whisky.

I’d hoped there’d be enough to take some into my colleagues at work too. Unfortunately my boyfriend is a greedy man so there wasn’t. But I did had about half a pack of ginger biscuits left, which I took into work instead. Fortunately my workmates are easily pleased.