[[ No, wait, let's make that the new decade's recipes. I'm with the "convention determines usage" on the decades front: the 80s do not include 1990. Oddly enough, I side with the centuries-and-millennia from one group, so my decades and centuries don't run in sync. I guess it's all about the Ordinals vs. the Cardinals (weren't they from St. Louis?) John Layt, are you going to support that feature too? ]]

So, baking. I've taught Mira how to crack open an egg into a bowl for baking a cake without getting bits of shell and gunk into the batter. It cost a half dozen eggs over a bunch of practice sessions, but now I can delegate that bit to her. She'll be baking bran muffins all by herself, soon. But today we made a pecan cake which turned out really well, so I thought I'd share the recipe. This also serves as a demonstration for what you can get if you're one of the lucky winners of the Freedom Food donation drive from the FSFE.

Pecan Cake: Mix three (3) eggs, one cup of sugar, half tsp. of salt and one tsp. vanilla extract with a hand mixer on high for about 10 minutes. Add 1 cup of chopped or whole pecans and one cup self-raising flour (maybe a tad more). Mix briefly until all blended, then in the oven at 160C for 30 minutes or until a fork comes out clean. Frost with 100g mascarpone and 100g icing sugar and 2 drops lemon juice.

See, my recipes, like my time-reckoning, use a mix of units and conventions. Basic stuff gets North American units applied, but I've never used an oven that didn't have a scale in centigrade (well, except during CampKDE last year, where I baked cookies for most of the attendees, but that was .. exceptional, shall we say).