Recipe | Maypole Cake

Whether you end up dancing or not, the Maypole encapsulates the month’s playful spirit – we think it’s the, er… icing on the cake

Makes 1 cake
350g rhubarb, cut into 1cm chunks
50g caster sugar
Zest and juice of 1 orange
300ml double cream, whipped
Icing sugar, for dusting

For the cake:
200g butter, softened
200g caster sugar
4 eggs
Zest and juice of 1 orange
200g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder

1 Preheat the oven to 180C/Fan 160C/ Gas 4. Put the rhubarb in a roasting tin, sprinkle over the sugar, orange zest and juice. Cover and cook for 15 mins, or until the rhubarb is soft, but not falling apart. Leave to cool.

2 To make the cake, beat the butter and sugar together until creamy. Add one egg at a time with a spoonful of flour to stop the mixture curdling.

3 Add the orange zest and juice. Fold in the flour and baking powder and pour into two greased and lined 20cm sandwich tins. Bake for around 20 mins, checking they’re cooked by piercing the middle with a skewer until it comes out clean. Leave in the tins for 15 mins before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

4 To serve, fold the rhubarb into the whipped cream and generously cover the base of one sponge with the mix. Sandwich the second cake on top and dust lightly with some icing sugar. To make a tabletop Maypole Use a knitting needle and 6mm-wide ribbons. Tie the ribbons to the top of the needle and pierce the cake, leaving the ribbons to stream around or tuck them underneath the base of the sponge.

This Maypole Cake recipe is just one of the recipes from our May ‘gathering’ feature which we’ve called ‘Come What May’. It’s a menu for a Whitsun Get-Together, hopefully in the sunshine (British weather allowing) and also incudes recipes for Quick Elderflower & Rosemary Cordial, Pickled Radish on Rye, Whitsun Warldorf Salad, Asparagus & Pea Quiche and Herby Broadbean Couscous. The recipes are by Lucy Brazier and the photographs by Jonathan Cherry.

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Playlist | Folk

DJ: Frances Ambler
Image: Shutterstock

Our May issue celebrates the goodness of FOLK in all its forms… including folk music. Have a listen to our latest playlist here.
Or have a browse of all our playlists here. We publish one in each monthly issue.
Happy listening!

Recipe: Wild garlic bannocks with asparagus pesto

Bannocks are a traditional May Day food, and Beltane cake may have been similar: a scone-like bread cooked on a griddle over the Beltane fire. Wild garlic is carpeting every woodland floor at the moment, and it makes a savoury and aromatic addition.

Wild garlic bannocks

Makes up to 20 bannocks
550g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
1⁄2 tsp salt
1 tbsp caster sugar
50g butter
a good handful of wild garlic leaves, washed and dried
1 egg
150ml buttermilk (or full fat milk with 3 tbsp of yoghurt stirred in)

1 You can cook these over a griddle on a fire or hob, or in the oven. If cooking in the oven, preheat it to 230C/Fan 210C/450F.
2 In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar, then chop in the butter and rub it in with your fingers until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Slice the wild garlic leaves and mix them in.
3 Beat the egg into the buttermilk (or milk and yoghurt) and then start mixing it into the dry mix to form a dough. Bring it together and knead it briefly on a floured surface, before rolling it out to about an inch in thickness (a little thinner if cooking on the griddle) and cut out rounds or squares from it.
4 Place on a baking sheet and bake for 8-10 mins, or place onto a hot griddle and cook for around 5 mins on each side. Test one to check that it is cooked through. Serve the bannocks hot, split and buttered.

This is a wonderful way of using up any asparagus ends and offcuts, as they are full of flavour but the processing removes any stringiness and toughness.

Asparagus pesto

450g asparagus spears or offcuts
50g hazelnuts
1 clove of garlic, crushed
60ml extra virgin olive oil (plus a little extra for finishing)
75g finely grated Parmesan cheese
juice of half a lemon
salt and pepper

1 Steam the asparagus over boiling water for 8-10 mins, until it can be easily pierced with a sharp knife. Remove from the heat and leave the asparagus to cool.
2 Dry fry the hazelnuts over a high heat for a few minutes until the skins start to come away and the nuts become slightly toasted. Remove from the heat and tip into a clean tea towel then rub off any loose skins.
3 When nuts and asparagus are cool, tip them into a food processor with the garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese. Pulse until everything is broken up and amalgamated but still has some texture. If the pesto is too thick, add a little more olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and
a squeeze of lemon juice, to taste.

This recipe was first publisjed in the May 2016 issue of The Simple Things. so we think it’s definitely time to give it another go.

From our May issue…

More recipes for Spring days…

Nostalgia | Weird but wonderful childhood hobbies

Were you the proud owner of a rubber collection or a keen creator of garden homes for clay dragons? You’ve found your people. Read on…

We’re celebrating the art of being bored in our May issue, something we’ve all got a little more time to dedicate to at the moment. And we’ve been remembering the ways we used to spend long days with not much to do when we were children, when hobbies mainly took place in our bedrooms and craft equipment might extend only to a tin of paints, some polymer clay and a scrapbook, but were no less absorbing for it. If anything we were more obsessed then than we have been since. 

We asked The Simple Things staff what their favourite strange hobbies were as children and have made a list of the most popular here, along with ideas for how you could ‘grown-up-ify’ them to enjoy them again. (Though don’t let us stop you if you still want to build a matchbox house for a woodlouse. Life’s rich tapestry and all that…)

Building tiny things

Wasn’t Fimo and the like an absolute dream for creative types? Several of us spent most of our formative years making entire tiny villages and peoples from polymer clay, painstakingly cutting out tiny eyes, ears, dresses and dragons. One TST staff member (who should remain nameless to save her blushes) then photographed them and stuck all the photographs into notebooks, cataloguing each character and their backstory in tiny, tedious detail. Oh the excitement of being able to create your very own world exactly as wanted it (skill permitting) and then the delicious anticipation of it coming out of the oven, stuck fast to an old baking tray and hotter than the sun for the next 20 minutes, meaning you could only stand and stare on tenterhooks until it was cool enough to handle.

If you’re a pre-Fimo child perhaps you did the same with plasticine, salt dough or something else sticky that dried to a fine, unremovable patina on your sweaty hands, and adhered itself with vigour to your bedroom carpet (sorry, Mum). 

Grown-up tiny building: If you still harbour a love of building tiny things deep down, try making walnut shell dioramas. Delightfully bonkers and madly charming. Look them up on Pinterest or Etsy for ideas. 

Spotting and jotting

Were you a keen train spotter? Or, possibly even a car number plate spotter? It’s ok. You’re among friends. A frighteningly large number of us remember standing at the living room window making notes of car number plates as they passed and keeping log books of them. Riveting. But there’s a certain delight in looking out for things to ‘spot’ and keeping records of when and where they were recorded. It’s kept Eye Spy books in business for years, after all! What satisfaction there once was in seeing an engine never before glimpsed in our part of the country, or passing a rare Edward VIII post box. 

Grown-up spotting and jotting: One word: birds. Shake off your ideas of twitchers being, erm, men of a certain age. Birdwatching is the ultimate cool hobby for those who love spotting things and keeping notes about it. Try How to be a Bad Birdwatcher (Short Books) by Simon Barnes to get you started.

Studying the Argos catalogue to degree level

They didn’t call it the Book of Dreams for nothing. We all remember endless afternoons spent poring over the Argos catalogue, first choosing something from each page we would buy if it was a ‘buy something from each page or face certain death’ situation (obviously). Then we made fantasy wedding lists. Eternal Bow crockery featured quite heavily. Then, when the new catalogue arrived, the best part of all… being allowed to cut up the old Argos catalogue and create room sets for our dream homes, with polished teak dining tables stuck down next to chintzy curtains and garish lampshades. Bliss. 

Grown-up catalogue crafting: If you still love a bit of interior design dreaming, get on Pinterest and start creating moodboards for all your rooms. It’ll give you a good starting place next time you have a home decorating project on your hands and is still a surprisingly relaxing way to spend an afternoon with a cup of tea. And best of all, money is no object when you’re window shopping. 

Rose petal perfume

Be honest, did anyone NOT at some point strip their parents’ rose bushes of petals, collect them all in a bucket, fill it with water and stir it daily in certainty it would eventually smell like Chanel No 5? And, then, in spite of the disappointment of having created nothing but a bucket of filthy, stagnant water, did any of us NOT do it all again the following week, certain that if we could just tweak the recipe correctly we’d get there? We thought not. It was good fun though wasn’t it?

Grown-up rose petal perfume: Make real beauty products and experiment with essential oils at home. We have a few ideas in our May issue in our feature, Natural Selection. We recommend the skin-boosting body butter in particular. 

Building your own zoo

Before we begin, we’d like to apologise to all the woodlice that went home from school in our pockets to the Woodlouse Zoo and ants that probably didn’t enjoy Ant Castle as much as we had hoped, and every poor beetle that spent 20 terrified minutes in our matchboxes. At least our pets had some peace while we were hunting ladybirds. We know now that it wasn’t right, but it’s hard to absorb that message when you’re a three-foot naturalist. Insects are fascinating as well as being an essential part of our environment. Perhaps you need to be nearer the ground to appreciate them fully, and forget about them as you grow and they become further away, but we spent many a happy hour creating habitats for unwilling wildlife and studying tiny thoraxes, little legs and amazing antennae. 

Grown-up entomology: If you still have a yearning to build a B&B for bugs, you’re in luck. There are endless habitats on the market for everything from ladybirds to butterflies, and you can always build your own, too, with a few bricks, palettes, sticks and stones and the odd bit of cardboard and cotton wool to create cosy holes for insects looking for somewhere to lay their heads. And you’ll be doing the earth a favour at the same time.

Read our feature The Lost Art of Boredom on p90 of the May issue.

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May: a final thought

We hope you enjoyed our May ‘Relish’ issue, and our back cover cartoon

This month we have loved celebrating the outdoors, relishing long weekends and making the most of the late spring sunshine. In homage to all that, here’s our May haiku. We’ve chosen the theme of casting not a ‘clout’ until May be out. But do have a go at writing your own (on anything May-related) and leave it in the comments below. We’ll send a lovely book to the author of our favourite.

Discard vests in May!

When they said ‘cast ne’er a clout’

They meant the hawthorn.

More thoughts from our back cover…

More from our May issue…

Etymology: jukebox

Photography: Jonathan Cherry

Because words are important (and rather fun, too)

Jolly jukeboxes - they conjure up images of 1950s American teens, jiving around milk bars, or perhaps a memory of pubs in the late 1980s where you could spend 20p selecting a careful playlist of Bros’s Drop The Boy, back to back with Rod Stewart’s Maggie May.

But, interestingly, the roots of the word ‘jukebox’ go much further back and much further afield. Specifically, to the Sea Islands, just off the Carolinas where a tongue known as ‘Gullah’, a creole of several West African languages and English, which grew up around slaves, was brought to the region in the 18th century.

In Gullah, the word ‘jook’ meant disorderly or living wickedly. A jook house was a sort of dance hall, gaming room and brothel, rolled into one. Wicked indeed! And not a spot for a quiet evening out with religious folk, but much fun if you wanted a dance, a cup of moonshine and perhaps something even more ‘jook’. The term was first written down in the 1930s but probably goes back much further.

The first jukeboxes, back in the 1890s, were known by many names, but mostly ‘nickel-in-the-slot machines’ and the term ‘jukebox’ was first recorded in Time magazine, referencing the jook houses of the period: “Glenn Miller attributes his crescendo to the juke-box’, which retails recorded music at 5c a shot in bars, restaurants and small roadside dance joints.”

So there we have jukeboxes: making the journey from wicked (as in evil) to wicked (as in wonderful). Don’t even get us started on the etymology of that one.

We do love a jukebox. If you do, too, don’t miss our ‘analogue’ feature, which takes a look back at the inventiveness and craftsmanship of life before the digital age and this month features a company manufacturing jukeboxes.

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Cake facts: the best banana loaf

Because if a cake’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly

We’ve got a delicious banana walnut loaf in our May issue (pictured above, from Nourish Cakes by Marianne Stewart, Quadrille). Everyone has their own tips for creating the ‘best banana loaf cake in the world’, usually handed down from capable grandparents and great-grandparents. But the one we all know is that black bananas are best. But why?

Black (or slightly over-ripe bananas) are often recommended as being easier to digest, but what makes them the best choice for a banana loaf cake is their flavour and texture.

Firstly, as they ripen and the yellow skin gets steadily blacker, chemical reactions inside the banana flesh turn the starch into sugars, making them taste sweeter and that bit more banana-y in the cake.

Secondly, the flesh becomes softer and easier to mash, and it also breaks down more easily during the baking process, so you don’t get lumps of banana in the cake once it’s cooked. You might like lumps of banana in your cake, in which case, don’t allow us to lead you down a black banana path - feel free to go your own way - but a riper banana gives a smoother cake, nonetheless.

Catching your bananas at the perfect level of cake-readiness is tricky. Ideally, you want a banana that is pretty dark but still has some yellow on it and lots of big, black spots and patches, but you can definitely still bake with completely black bananas. And here’s a pro-banana tip for you: if you’ve got to Tuesday and your bananas look perfect for a loaf cake but you know you won’t be baking until Saturday, pop them in the freezer. The skins will turn completely black in there but the flesh inside will remain at the same level of ripeness, waiting for you to release it from the freezer drawer (take them out a couple of hours before you want them), mash the banana and help it on its way to its higher state of being, transformed from slightly disappointing fruit bowl fellow to much welcomed fluffy banana loaf.

You’ll find the recipe for the banana walnut cake on p29 of our May issue.

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More cakes to bake…

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Playlist: Songs About Cats

Listen at thesimplethings.com/blog/catplaylist

All join in

In the interests of fairness, next month’s playlist is Songs About Dogs. Do you have a favourite? Tell us on Facebook, @thesimplethingsmag, and it might be included next time.

More from our May issue…

More of our playlists…

The Titanic | A liner to remember

The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is one of the world’s most famous tragedies, with the loss of around 1,500 lives. “As the first major international disaster in peacetime, it generated a huge interest,” says Eric Kentley, co-curator of ‘Titanic Stories’ at National Maritime Museum, Cornwall. “Not just in America, Britain and Ireland, but also in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. No area seemed to be untouched.” But it continues to fascinate.

As Kentley points out, “Few people have heard about the Doña Paz or the Wilhelm Gustloff, which are far worse tragedies.” The reason, he thinks, is “partly because it is so rich in stories.” He explains: “In the two hours 40 minutes it took for the ship to sink, you can see every type of human behaviour – self-sacrifice, self-preservation, bravery, cowardice, duty, incompetence... It’s very easy to imagine ourselves on the deck of that ship and wonder how we would behave.”

Some positives did emerge from the disaster, however, such as a re-examination of safety measures at sea. And, for the QE2, a perhaps surprising surge in bookings following the release of the James Cameron film.

‘Ocean Liners: Speed and Style’, sponsored by Viking Cruises, is at the V&A until 17 June, and opens at the Dundee V&A on 15 September. ‘Titanic Stories' is at National Maritime Museum, Cornwall until 7 January 2019.

Turn to page 86 of May's The Simple Things for more on our look back at ocean liners.
 

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Elderflower toner

The scented cream blooms of elderflowers have been used by women since time immemorial – in infusions to soften the skin and even out tone. The addition of glycerine gives a moisturising effect, leaving the skin silky smooth.

Makes around 200ml
1 head of fresh elderflowers (or 2 tsp dried)
200ml boiling water
5ml glycerine (optional)

1 Remove the stalks from the elderflowers (if using fresh) and put the tiny flowers in a mug or heatproof bowl.
2 Pour over boiling water, then cover with a plate and leave to infuse until cool.
3 Strain out the elderflowers, then add the glycerine (if using) to the liquid and mix well.
4 To use, soak cotton pads or a muslin cloth in the liquid and use as a toner or simple cleanser, once make-up has been removed. Use twice a day. The liquid will keep in the fridge for up to three days.

Turn to page 34 of May's The Simple Things for more on spring hedgerow foraging. 

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The bizarre art of vegetable carving

Some people insist that a contest fashioning vegetables into weird and wonderful shapes is child’s play. Others, for shame, feel it is a “novelty”. Tell that to the competitor at last year’s Lambeth Country Show who fashioned her veg into a wan woman carrying a basket of greens while clad in shapeless red robe and big white bonnet, and called the entry ‘The Handmaid’s Kale’. She was no uniquely skilled chard chiseller, but a solitary example of a nationwide craft. Walk past the vegetable-carving tent of your local village show and you’re likely missing some of the most inspired work on site.

Turn to page 68 of May's The Simple Things for more of our country show feature.

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Exploring Wales and the West Country by bike

Spring is the time to explore Wales and the West Country - regions that are especially beautiful when explored by bike, says cyclist and author Jack Thurston

"There was a time when I would cycle to Cornwall every summer from my home in London, to join friends in a holiday cottage on the beach. Each year I took a slightly different route, staying overnight with people I knew along the way, or just sleeping out in the open. It usually took me four full days. By train it’s just a few hours. My average speed on those summer rides was about 12 miles an hour, which sounds slow but by historical standards, the bicycle is actually pretty quick. It’s four times walking pace and double the speed of a horse-drawn carriage.

"The bicycle, and only the bicycle, combines speed, efficiency and freedom with a total immersion in the world around us. Riding through the sun, the wind and the rain, every sight, sound and smell is as vivid and immediate as it can be. Cyclists experience the landscape with a detail and definition that is just a blur when travelling by car or train. As Ernest Hemingway puts it, “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”

Jack Thurston is author of Lost Lanes West and Lost Lanes Wales (Wild Things Publishing)

Turn to page 79 of May's The Simple Things for more of Jack's springtime cycling advice.

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Growing | My year-round cut flower guide

It's not difficult to fill your house with something flowery all year long. It just takes a little planning and imagination.

On page 106 of May's The Simple Things, Francine Raymond shares her productive small garden in Kent, including this guide to a year-round cut flower guide.

January 
Indoor bulbs planted in October come into their own. This is the time to enjoy narcissi, hyacinths, cymbidium orchids and amaryllis. 
February 
Flowering cherries, sweet box, daphne, helebores and mahonia are fragrant additions to the home. Pussy willow, hazel and birch twigs add interesting structure to any vase. 
March 
I snip branches of pear before the buds burst: the warmth of the house brings them into leaf and bud. 
April
Time for tulips. I like to display them in a row of little glass bottles or bunched together in a crate.
May 
One of my favourite plants, auriculas, flower now. They can be brought indoors and displayed on a windowsill out of direct sunlight. 
June 
Sweetpeas flower in abundance this month. I keep picking to ensure there are plenty of blooms.
July 
Lavender is at its headiest now. Once bees have finished with the flowers, I clip off the stems and put them in a big basket.
August 
Succulents are at their best in August. I put pots of sempervivums and sedums on the kitchen table. 
September 
Now is the time to forage hedgerows for berries to display. A few sloe branches and some rosehips add extra colour.
October 
I grow pumpkins for decoration, then pile them high in the porch and festoon them with Virginia creeper.
November 
I press the heart-shaped leaves of cercis between sheets of paper; and dry seedheads and flowers for festive decorations. 
December 
I take cardoon heads and little pumpkins and turn them into nightlight holders.

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Nest | Rosemarijn's style

Just because a house is old, it doesn’t have to look old-fashioned. Modern furniture and materials will bring it up-to-date.

• I love plywood and we used it extensively throughout the house to clad walls, and make furniture. It’s light, affordable and looks contemporary.
• All our walls are painted white because we wanted the house to be light and feel spacious. It also shows off the loveliness of the timber beams and natural materials.
• I don’t like a lot of clutter but I do like to have beautiful things, like classic pieces of furniture and art, around me. They lift my spirits.

Turn to page 98 of May's The Simple Things for more of Rosemarijn's tumble-down farmhouse.

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How to make a peg bag

Hanging out the washing is an unusual and surprising thing: a pleasurable household chore. If it’s a fresh morning and the sun is shining, the simple act of pegging clothes on a line before you can lift the spirits and blow away gloominess. As the days extend and there’s more likelihood of sun, it’s also a chance to get outdoors and away from everyone indoors. Doing something methodical provides the opportunity for a moment or two of peaceful reflection – just you, the breeze, a handful of pegs and some billowing sheets. The results are also worth it: the fresh, outdoor smell of line-dried laundry will have you burying your nose in the laundry basket and inhaling deeply. As a method of drying clothes, pegging out is 100% better than piling them in an energy-gobbling, clothes-battering tumble dryer, or heaping them on radiators and leaving them to steam.

Every washing line needs a bag full of pegs nearby for easy pegging out. How to cunningly create one from a child’s polo shirt.

Here’s a clever thing: peg bags are suspended from a hanger so, rather than create a new bag from scratch, why not use an item that is already the right shape and size? Buy a child’s polo shirt (the one above is £3.99, hm.com), or better still use one they have grown out of or no longer like. Turn it inside out, stitch the bottom of the shirt closed about half way down the length of the body, trim surplus fabric, and turn it the right way round. Insert a child’s hanger and fill with pegs. Job done.

Turn to page 111 of May's The Simple Things for more on pegging out.

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Find your natural strength

Treating resilience not as an innate quality, but as a skill to be practised and nurtured, allows you to make lemonade whenever life throws you lemons

The Finnish word sisu refers to a mix of courage, resilience, grit and ‘guts’. In her new book Sisu: The Finnish Art of Courage (Gaia), Joanna Nylund explains how the Finns’ close connection with the weather and nature has played a crucial role in forging the resilient nature of the people. “Living in Finland means living with sharp contrasts,” she says. “It is the extremes that rule our lives – from gritting our teeth and summoning our sisu at the approach of winter to celebrating the eagerly anticipated summer with a devotion to the sun that most closely resembles Celtic worship.”

After that long, hard winter, the Finns’ summer ritual is more about celebrating discomfort than luxury hotels or even glamping. In late June, the country collectively withdraws from everyday life and heads out into nature, spending a few weeks in a mökki (summer cabin). The cabin will have a fireplace and cooking facilities, but rarely central heating – and sometimes no electricity or running water.

“Squatting by the lake to wash your dishes in cold water is so romantic!” says Nylund, who explains how their ancestors grew resilient through hardship. “We are modern people living in a modern world, but at heart we are still rural, and we love our sometimes harsh environment. It has given us our sisu.”

Nature is grounding, it teaches self-sufficiency and spending time in it boosts self-esteem. You don’t have to spend four weeks in a cabin – start by spending a bit of time outdoors every day, read and learn a little about the nature around you, dabble in being more self-sufficient by growing a few veg or salad leaves in your garden, spend a night under canvas, and go from there.

Turn to page 92 of May's The Simple Things for more of our feature on How to bounce back.
 

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Face the sun and shadows will fall behind you

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Recipe | Olive oil, rosemary & apricot cake

If you’re not keen on an oversweet cake, this one’s for you. The Mediterranean mix of olive oil, rosemary and lemon is sensational

Olive oil, rosemary & apricot cake

5 eggs, separated
165g caster sugar, plus 1 tbsp to sprinkle
1⁄4 tsp salt
185ml olive oil
Juice & finely grated zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary
150g plain flour, sifted
10 apricots, halved & stones removed (or tinned apricot halves, drained)

to serve (optional)
300ml soured cream or crème fraîche
30g icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp vanilla extract/essence or vanilla bean paste

1 Preheat oven to 170C/Fan 150C/Gas 3. Grease the ring of a 20–22cm springform tin, then turn the base upside down, so it no longer has a lip. Place a piece of baking paper over it, then clamp the ring around it to secure.
2 In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the egg whites with an electric mixer on medium speed until just foamy. Add 55g of the caster sugar in two batches, whisking well between each addition, until soft peaks form. Set aside.
3 Combine the egg yolks, remaining (110g) caster sugar and salt in a medium mixing bowl, and whisk with an electric mixer on high speed until pale and thick. Gradually drizzle in the olive oil, whisking on high speed until all of it has been used. Add the lemon juice and zest, rosemary and flour, and stir with a whisk until just combined.
4 Whisk in one-third of the egg whites to loosen the mixture, then add the remainder and stir very gently with the whisk until combined. Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin, and arrange the apricot halves in concentric circles on top, working from the outside in.
5 Sprinkle the extra tbsp of caster sugar evenly over the surface, and bake for about 50 mins, or until an skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
6 To make a vanilla cream, if using, combine the cream, icing sugar and vanilla in a medium mixing bowl and whisk by hand or with an electric mixer until floppy peaks form.
7 Once the cake is cooked, rest it in the tin for 5 mins before releasing the ring and sliding the cake onto a wire rack to cool. Leave to rest for about 30 mins before slicing and serving – warm works for this cake – with your choice of dolloping cream!

Recipe from Poh Bakes 100 Greats by Poh Ling Yeow (Murdoch Books).
 

Cake in the House is our monthly recipe feature - get a cake recipe every month in The Simple Things!

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Processions | 100 years of votes for women

On 10 June walk to mark 100 years of votes for women. With handmade banners and wearing the suffragette colours of green, white and violet, marchers will form a river of colour through London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. Details at processions.co.uk

PROCESSIONS is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in a mass participation artwork to celebrate one hundred years of votes for women. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the first British women the right to vote and stand for public office. One hundred years on, we are inviting women* and girls across the UK to come and mark this historic moment as part of a living portrait of women in the 21st century.

On Sunday 10th of June, women and girls in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London will walk together as part of this celebratory mass participation artwork. Wearing either green, white or violet, the colours of the suffrage movement, the PROCESSIONS will appear as a flowing river of colour through the city streets.

One hundred women artists are being commissioned to work with organisations and communities across the UK to create one hundred centenary banners for PROCESSIONS as part of an extensive public programme of creative workshops.

Sign up: processions.co.uk

DON'T MISS: Next month, we look at why women march, plus how to make your own banner or pennant. All in the June issue (on sale 30 May).

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Stories behind superstitions | Knock on wood

Why do we knock on wood? We’ve been leafing through the history books to trace the roots of this belief

Don’t want to lose this good thing – as the song goes – well, you better knock, knock on wood. We’ve been using the phrase since at least the 19th century to protect our good fortune but theories as to why link it back even further. It’s thought that in pagan cultures, it was used either to call on the protection of spirits, or scare away malignant forces.

A Christian interpretation links it to the wood of Christ’s cross – as well as a Jewish one, recalling the coded knocks of escape networks during the Spanish inquisition. A later interpretation links to a child’s game of tag, and the knocking on wood that means “safe”, made more plausible by the fact the first written reference to touching wood is as recent as 1899. Nevertheless, variations of the superstition appear in many different cultures. Italians, for example, instead will find themselves “touching iron”.

Get hold of your copy of this month's The Simple Things - buy, download or subscribe

View the sampler here.

More from the May issue:

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