Parkin meter

It's been a little while now since I developed the accidental parkin, but I've since made it a few times - deliberately, of course! - and tweaked it a bit as I've gone on. I'd say I now have the final recipe, and so, before I do anything else, I'd like to share that.

200 g chopped dates
200 ml water
200 g fine oatmeal
200 g soft brown sugar
50 g blackstrap molasses (or treacle, probably; this is approximate because weighing it is a faff, so I just eyeball it)
1 tsp ground ginger
1 level tsp bicarb
1 tsp lemon juice

Line a deep round 15 cm cake tin. (I recommend a metal one, and I shall explain why later in the post.) Put the dates and the water in a dish and microwave for about 3 minutes, then remove from the microwave and stir in the molasses or treacle. Allow to cool for 20 - 30 minutes; this also allows the dates to absorb the water.

Mix the oatmeal, sugar, ginger, and bicarb in a mixing bowl (I think my small one is about 2 litres, and that works perfectly). Stir the lemon juice into the date mixture. Preheat the air fryer to 150 C for 5 minutes (I'm sure you can do this in a conventional oven, but you'll probably need a higher temperature).

Tip the date mixture into the mixing bowl and stir until it is all well mixed, then transfer to the lined tin and bake for 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Enjoy now or later; it freezes beautifully.

When I first made this, I put the hot date mixture pretty well straight into the dry ingredients. While that does work, letting it cool and thicken a bit is much better for two reasons. First of all you get a better consistency, but, more importantly, it also rises much better, because you're not getting the bicarb reacting with the acid and letting out all the gas before it even goes into the air fryer. The dates are also then able to bind the mixture better, so you don't need the chia seed I originally used.

Now, you wanted to know why I recommended a metal tin, right? OK. Let me take you back to the church lunch cakes for a moment.

When I first started making the larger cake, I did it in the metal tin; and I was a little bit surprised that it took, effectively, the same amount of baking as the tiny little cake (yes, you do it for longer, but at a lower temperature so it balances out, more or less). But it did, and that was fine; and then one Sunday I rolled up to church with these two cakes as I normally do for church lunch, and the larger cake turned out not to be a cake at all but some kind of sticky pudding. While it did go down very well, it wasn't what I'd intended to bring, and I was very surprised. Why should it suddenly come out so extremely underdone when I'd been reliably putting it in at that temperature and taking it out fully cooked half an hour later?

So next time I stuck a skewer in it, which I'd previously given up doing because it had always been done in half an hour in the past. Same thing. I had to give it another ten minutes. That was very puzzling, but at least I did have a cake now. I seriously considered altering the recipe I'd written down... until the last church lunch, when the silicone containers were already in use, so I stuck it in the metal tin.

It took half an hour.

And then I recalled that the last time I'd made the parkin, I'd put it in the silicone containers (both of them, as they aren't as deep as the metal tin) and done them for half an hour each, and they were still a touch underdone. I had my answer.

I mean... yes, I've done physics; I know about things like conductivity and heat capacity. If I'd thought about it, I'd have expected things to take a little longer to cook in a silicone container than in a metal one. But I would never have expected such a noticeable difference, and especially not in an air fryer, where the heat is coming from the top. (This is the case with mine, at any rate; it may be different for others.) For what it's worth, the tiny little gluten-free cake for the church lunch is done in a glass ramekin - Pyrex or something similar - because I don't have a metal tin that size. Glass conducts heat better than silicone does, though not as well as metal; however, I'm fairly sure it also has quite a high heat capacity. If I could get hold of a small enough metal tin, it would be very interesting to do the comparison.

And in other news, the new earring design is now available in the shop (even if you don't want to buy anything, I'd be deeply grateful if you could share the main shop link on social media, because, believe me, trying to publicise it is a nightmare), plus I have permission to sell my earrings at the local Midsummer Festival on Saturday, which is also when the play is going to be performed. (We had one last year, as well, but I didn't go because I was still recovering from the concert I put on the night before, which went very well once it started but there were some pretty serious pre-concert hitches. Apparently it's to celebrate midsummer. I have no idea why anyone would want to do that, but each to their own and all that.) So I shall spend half an hour or so being Lewis Carroll, and then I shall nip home (it's only five minutes away, if that), change (or at the very least ditch the bow tie), grab my box of stock and a tray to sell it from, then return to the festival and trundle around selling earrings. It's one of those situations where being in a mobility scooter is actually useful, because I can have the tray on my lap rather than needing to hang it round my neck. Hand made locally! Every pair unique! Save quite a whack on the website prices! (I'll still have to charge a little over the odds because they want a "donation", which I feel is just a nice way of saying "tax" since it appears to be compulsory... but only a little. No postage. Everyone wins.)

Also, the skirt which was originally going to be a bag is nearly finished; more fabric is arriving shortly so I can run up a few more of them; and this afternoon I'm off to go and look at beads, so no prizes for guessing what Friday's post is likely to be about. And apparently there exists a photo of the entire cast, including me as Lewis Carroll looking very much as if I'm about to be viciously attacked by a flamingo.

I shall see if I can get my hands on that one for Monday!