I'm a big, beefy kinda guy. In my younger days I played rugby union, you know, the game they play in heaven. I managed to make the State under age side before my life took off in a different direction. My position was tight head prop, one of the guys that holds up the entire scrum, so because of that and the work I do, which can be pretty physical, it would be fair to say I'm actually fairly strong.

My wife loves that but perhaps not in the way you might think.

Take last night for instance. D wanted to make a cake to take to work. She has this lovely cake, it's almost a slice really, filled with fruit and a special topping made with meringue and custard powder, topped off with grated pastry. Different fruits get a run depending on what's available, it could be peaches, apricots, rhubarb or last night it was half and half, sour cherries and gooseberries. From the jar.

That means the jars pass by me first and I pop the lids, which as you all know sometimes is not the easiest thing to do. Generally anything bought in a jar is not too bad, but anything that has been preserved at home can be a bit of a challenge to remove the lids. So the lid of the gooseberries came off straight away but the sour cherries needed a bit more grunt. Maybe it's silly, but I somehow feel more manly when I do this job for her.

Another thing I do around the kitchen is to pretty much hand whisk everything, mayonnaise, whipped cream, whatever. It just seems easier than dragging out the mixer and cleaning up everything afterwards. I reckon I could take on a Kitchen Aid and get it to smoke point. D takes advantage of this tendency, for rather than getting the mixer out herself, she just hands me a bowl and the whisk and sets me at it; soon there was a lovely thick meringue, a rich golden colour from the addition of custard powder.

But my manly duties didn't stop there, oh no. There was the pastry to be grated over the top. In order to do this, you need to first chill the pastry in the freezer to get it firm enough to grate. D handed me a lump of pastry and a grater. The pastry was feeling a little cold, I gave it a little grate and discovered it was frozen! There would have been half a kilo of frozen pastry that had to be grated straight away, for the meringue topping was in place.

You cannot begin to imagine how hard it was to do, when it was over I was knackered. Manly or not, I think grating frozen pastry is going to be my line in the sand.

Labels: fruit cakes, grated pastry, manliness