Sometimes when I’m baking at home, the hardest thing about starting is trying to select some music to listen to. Two birthdays ago, B bought me an iPod with a cute set of speakers, as my kitchen sound system. What I did prior to this was to turn up the volume of the speakers in the lounge room, so that I could hear the music while in the kitchen, several walls away. Of course, the arrangement I have now is much better.

While B has quite a large CD collection that I can pick and choose from, I find there tends to be just a few albums that get played repeatedly when I cook. If I’m chopping or kneading, it’s usually something by the Chilli Peppers. Lately, if I’m doing any baking, I’ve been listening to Sufjan Stevens or Neko Case. This cake was made entirely with her album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood :

There’s a packet of dates (purchased eons ago) that has been staring me in the face every time I peek into the pantry. They are looking very dry now, so I didn’t fancy eating them straight from the packet.There are always some things that you find are way out of *date*, but in your mind you’re thinking, “it’s still good, it’s still good” (…this applies to several items I own, including a jar of vegemite that is two, almost three years out of date, and that I’m still working my way through). So I’d been saving these dates for a time when I felt like making some kind of date-y dish. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is sticky date pudding. But rather than proceed with the same recipe I always use, I thought it was time to try something different. In her Book of Baking, Sue Lawrence calls this a “warm date cake with fudge topping“. The sauce is made and poured over the cake half way through the baking process, and the result is a beautifully moist cake with a little something extra that sets it apart from the bog standard sticky date pudding : I don’t know if this was intended as part of the process, or maybe it happened to me by accident, but some of the sauce that was poured over the cake, formed a little chewy toffee layer around the edge of the cake, which I absolutely love.