Awright Treacle?

Er, not really, no.

On Wednesday night I got it into my head that I wanted to make a treacle tart.  I had leftover lemons, sans their zesty coats thanks to my Christmas Cake adventures over the weekend and some old bread kicking about.  'Yay for me' I thought to myself - 'I will not waste these bountiful items, I shall turn them into a beauteous pudding.' 

Meh. 

Really, I should have known better.  I was almost scuppered by my lack of double cream, but a quick flit to the shop on Wednesday before work solved that one.  On Thursday morning, before Oliver even surfaced, I had made a sweet pastry (never before been attempted in the house of Janice) and was bouncing around riding high on my achievement - I was officially Ahead Of The Game. 

I thought that the recommended thirty minutes chilling time was a mere guideline, and alllowed it to stretch into five hours.  It came out of the fridge as heavy as concrete and with a similar malleable texture.  Buggeration.  It took a lot of coaxing (and swearing) to get it 'rolled' out and into the tin and baked blind.  Baking blind, to my mind, is adding another process into an already lengthy affair.  Tsk.  I despise cooking things which involve more than one step.  Mashed potato falls into this category. 

At this point of the day, my kitchen was filled with the smell of baking pastry, Oliver was happily painting jars for Christmas purposes and Radio 2 was doing its soothing thing in the background.  It was at this point that my SiL knocked on the door.  I was thrilled to be chanced upon with my pinny on being motherly, housewifely and homely all at once.  The atmosphere was calm and welcoming and spoke nothing of the pastry tantrum which had passed before it nor the filling fury that was to come. 

I discovered that the bread I intended to use for breadcrumbs was mouldy and smelt dangerous to humankind and then I knocked over the little pot containing my squeezed lemon juice.  Through gritted teeth I announced to Oliver that another trip to the shops was necessary.

Fast forward several more hours, and the thing was finally ready to consume.  My calculations on the carb content of a sixth of this tart meant that we were giving Oliver a lot of insulin.  It was either wrongly calculated, or badly timed, because his blood sugar plummeted severely enough to cause him blurry vision and sent us into a bit of a panic of loading him up with fruit juice, milk and biscuits.  Hence at 2am his blood sugar was as high as it was when he went into hospital in March at diagnosis.

Treacle tart will not feature on the menu for some time.

I will not bore you with the tale of Friday's baking efforts where I put a cake in the oven only to turn around and find a carefully weighed out bowl of ground almonds on the worktop.  These should have been in the cake, in the oven.  My scream was heard in space. 

Fuxom.