BBQ weekend (+Olga's Cinnamon Cake)

Heads are sore, eyes are tired, stomachs are full to bursting. Had an old AZ pal up to visit this weekend, lots of eating and drinking ensued. Too much lemonade for me on Friday night meant that I woke up on BBQ day feeling rather sorry for myself, and with curiously yellow fingers (finally attributed in a wave of memory recovery to the chips/curry sauce from the 24h bakery DIRTY DIRTY DIRTY). I was struggling to be able to watch the cooking on Saturday Kitchen successfully, let alone manage the cooking I was supposed to be doing myself, but we all eventually pulled ourselves together and crawled over to Broughty Ferry for some fresh air and a sandwich, after which the world started to seem like a more hospitable place.
Just about finished everything we'd hoped to make before the BBQ revellers arrived, and a most successful BBQ was had by all - thankfully the sky cleared a little, and the gale force winds weakened enough to allow the BBQ to stay on the ground. Below is the recipe for Olga's cinnamon cake which always goes down well, v tasty.

Also here's a pic of Dan mid-way through our adventurous river crossing to get back to the trees after a seal spotting trip on Tentsmuir. It actually turned out to be a good thing that we didn't make it on Saturday because the weather on Sunday was beautiful. We saved ourselves from being sandblasted and rained on! The seals were doing their usual trick of staying on a distant sandbank when we take visitors to the beach, but we saw them with the binoculars and there were a couple swimming nearer in the water.



OLGA’S CINNAMON CAKE

Ingredients
250 ml sour-cream
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
175 g butter
2 eggs
250 ml sugar
450 ml flour (I used 225g)
1tsp vanilla flavour
0.5 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder

Ground cinnamon and sugar to fill.

Method
• Mix sour-cream, vanilla and bicarbonate in a bowl.
• In another bowl, beat sugar and butter until fluffy. Beat in one egg at a time.
• In a third bowl, mix the remaining dry ingredients; flour, salt and baking powder.
• Mix in the dry ingredients and the sour-cream mixture gradually with the butter/egg/sugar mix, to form a smooth, rather thick batter.
• Spread out half of the batter in a greased 9in tin. Sprinkle very generously with cinnamon and sugar (until cake mix isn't visible). Spread out the rest of the batter and sprinkle again with cinnamon and sugar.
• Bake 175°C 1h.