Another shot of cooking – it’s all I seem to do these days. This is the creamed together butter, sugar, eggs and flour that together constitute step two of the apple cakes I’m making. Step one is marinating the apples and dried fruit in cider (done yesterday – they’re steeping in the fridge while this step was happening). Step three is adding the two lots of ingredients together, adding more flour and baking.

The benefit of hindsight tells me I should have lined the tins as both cakes done in this batch have come out of the loaf tins bottom-less. I’ll make sure I do this when I make the remaining three cakes which’ll have to wait until tomorrow as our hens have gone on strike because they’re confined to barracks until after the wedding. (Long story to do with a path that got dug up by them and me losing my temper, having spent ages and a lot of physical effort making said path so their confinement is their own doing and it saves me from the worry of throttling them before the big day!)

In essence, the hens’ egg strike meant that when I looked in the cupboard for eggs, it was (in an almost unprecedented manner) empty. So, my last four eggs got used for these two and the remaining cakes have to wait until tomorrow until I can procure some more organic free-range ones from a friend.

In fact, there has only been a couple of hours of cooking today and some of that was preparing our evening meal. Most of the day has been spent shovelling concrete around the place. I am still promising myself a concrete mixer when I’m rich so the 250 kgs of concrete that we’ve mixed over the last couple of days has all been mixed by hand (well, spade actually).

You may think that it’s madness but believe me, anyone who has ever been in our kitchen will see why we’ve done what we’ve done. It all makes perfect sense in the context of a floor that sloped down about four inches in the space of a linear foot and a trip from the sitting room to the downstairs toilet (probably about 15 feet or five paces) that involved a step down then a step up again. So, we’ve replaced the slope with a step and filled in the hole that meant you had to step down then up again.

Believe me, I didn’t expect to spend today lugging 200kg (50kg yesterday) of concrete around in bags (from shop to home), spades (mixing) and finally buckets to transport from the mixing area to the kitchen.

This makes the cake-mixing seem like a complete doddle.