I make mistakes so that you don't have to. It's amazing how the things we don't think about trip us up. Take the example of the row of five begonias in pots on the shelf in the porch. The porch faces east, and is recessed into the side of the house to a depth of around two and a half feet. The exact dimensions are not important, and since Our Ginger has just got comfy tucked up against my hip as I type this, I'm afraid I'm not about to get up and go outside with a tape measure. The Systems Administrator built the shelf so that I could display pots of flowers, and after experimenting with various combinations I've decided that simple is more stylish, so nowadays use a row of identical pots of the same plant. Last winter it was pink cyclamen and white cyclamen the one before, and this summer it is orange flowered begonias with purple leaves, in new, crisp, fairly bright terracotta pots that coordinate with the colour of the flowers.
They were something of an impulse purchase, though as the porch doesn't get a great deal of light the range of what I can grow there is somewhat restricted. I don't think pelargoniums would be happy, so when I went shopping for summer bedding begonias or impatiens were on my mental shortlist. It so happened that I saw and rather liked the begonias, and didn't see any classic white flowered New Guinea impatiens, which I might well have bought if I'd found them first. The begonias are maybe a tiny bit insistent, and I'm not sure whether at the end of summer I'll attempt to overwinter them, or decide they were good for a few months but I've had my fun and discard them. Probably the former, knowing my visceral affection for plants, though sentiment and good garden design don't always go together.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the begonia at the front of the shelf, that got more sun than the others, was shorter and more floriferous. Wanting them to be an even height, without thinking I switched it with the one at the back. This was an error. Plucked forth from its shady corner and exposed to full sun for part of each day the plant from the back of the row has got sun scorched. I am slowly turning it so as to hide its damaged leaves, but another consequence of having been in the corner is that it has grown unevenly as well as lankily, and if I turn it too far I'm looking at mainly stalks plus the backs of the leaves. So now you know. Plants that can habituate by degrees to strong sun don't necessarily cope well if thrust abruptly from shade to bright light.
The second error was a mechanical one, another cake failure. I am slightly more disappointed with myself about this mistake since I noticed at the time that the instructions were anomalous, and failed to think the problem all the way through. Once again it happened with an unfamiliar Julie Duff recipe, she of Cakes Regional and Traditional, but this time it isn't really her fault. I followed a recipe for a honey sponge cake, made with wholemeal flour and brown sugar but otherwise the same proportions as a classic Victoria sponge or her reliable lemon loaf, identical weights each of flour, butter and sugar, and one egg per two ounces of flour, with six ounces of each of the dry ingredients and three eggs. She said that she always cooked it in a seven inch ring mould and could not imagine it in any other shape, adding that if you didn't have a ring mould you could use an ordinary tin instead.
I hadn't and so I did. I was surprised enough at the time that the cooking time was given as only thirty to forty minutes to check my recollection that the lemon cake, made with the same weight of ingredients, needed fifty to sixty at the same temperature, but not so curious that I thought about it further. The cake felt firm to the touch after forty minutes, and a skewer came out clean, but by the time I'd followed the final stage of the instructions and poured eight ounces of warm melted honey over it the centre had sunk slightly but ominously, and as I tried to turn the cake back the right way up the middle fell out. It was not cooked through, and being unused to cooking with wholemeal flour I'd been misled by how brown it was and how firm it felt. But I should have persisted with my instinct that the suggested cooking time could not be long enough, and of course a cake cooked in a ring mould with no centre would be ready in a shorter time.
It just goes to show how it's always worth thinking what you're doing with cake, and not just blindly following the written instructions in front of you. Fortunately although underdone in the middle the cake was not disgusting, and the Systems Administrator suggested we hot it up, serve it with cream and call it pudding. I have ordered myself a ring mould for next time, as I've fancied one for a while. There are some sponges that specifically need one, just to get the lifting effect of that column of hot air up the middle.
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