Cinnamon Teacake
The only cake I've cooked in the last half-decade
As you are probably aware if you read my last newsletter (posted several months ago), I currently have two young children. I also have no discretionary time and no brain. Before we had our kids I was the sort of person who really didn’t want to be exclusively defined by their role as ‘mother’. So much so that, in a fit of hormonal, adrenaline-fuelled insanity, I spent a brief-but-not-insignificant part of my first labour sending work emails in between contractions, telling myself that if I could manage the work/life juggle during labour, surely that would prove I wasn’t about to be all-consumed by motherhood.
Later that day, our son was born. Two and a half years later, so was our daughter.
And lo and behold, motherhood consumed me.
The thing is, if you spend 99.9999999% of your days (and nights) doing ONE THING, it is really quite hard to not become at least a little bit consumed by that thing. Yes, I still garden, kind of, with my kids. I still cook, with my kids. I still play very questionable 90s rap music, with my kids.
I get it, now. I get why women emerge from the early years of motherhood as if waking dazedly out of a fog. It is a beautiful, intense time, and there is so very little room left for much outside of it. I think I’m sort of ok with that, as long as I don’t have to stop cooking or gardening completely. Ideally, I could write to you here a little less sporadically too, but we’ll have to see where 2026 takes us.
Anyway, the other thing I meant to say is that apart from attempting to cling onto my two favourite pastimes in this season of life, I also happen to be totally, irrevocably, shockingly braindead. To the extent that I am wondering if there is some other comorbid condition that is obliterating my thought faculties beyond the condition of ‘just trying to raise small children without fucking them up’. Writing that last paragraph was challenging, for instance. But so is remembering what I had for lunch, what I did today, how old I am, what year it is and a myriad of other things that I swear, in some past life, used to feel like relatively simple cognitive operations.
Do you know what has become of me? Mothers, readers, tell me - does this end?? Will my brain function return? Or is this who I am now and forever? I would hope that if I was going to become significantly more dimwitted I might at least enjoy a dip in my neuroticism too, but that seems to have stuck around.
Either way, these days when I cook I have only one goal: cook something that can be made by a headstrong and energetic toddler acting under the guidance of a fool.
This is the only cake I make because it is easy, children love it, it’s almost impossible to screw up, it’s not too big or too little and it tastes like fresh, hot, cinnamon doughnuts.
I hope my brains one day return. Until then, I hope you like the cake.
Cinnamon Teacake
Serves 6-8
Ingredients
1/3 cup butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 egg
1 cup self-raising flour
1/3 cup milk
For the topping
3 Tbsp butter, melted
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Method
Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line a 20cm cake tin.
Beat the butter, caster sugar and vanilla essence with an electric beater until pale and creamy. Add the egg. Beat until well combined.
Use a large metal spoon to stir in half the flour, then all of the milk, then the remaining flour.
Spoon cake mixture into the tin and bake for ~25 minutes or until golden and cooked through (check by sticking a clean knife in the centre of the cake - the knife should come out clean)
Leave the cake to sit for 5 minutes. While it sits, combine the cinnamon and sugar in a small bowl. Pop the cake out onto a plate, brush it with the melted butter and sprinkle the cinnamon and sugar evenly over the cake. Serve while still warm (ideally with tea and strawberries).
Yes, it is totally normal for most of your cognitive faculties to have temporarily disappeared, and yes, they will return again! This is your matrescence, your brain is literally rewiring itself for your children's survival, and as your children get older and ever-so-slightly less dependent, you will start to feel like yourself in all sorts of ways. I promise. It happened to me too, and now I have two kids in school and mental capacity for all sorts of other things. Until then, remember to be kind to yourself (cue Jodi Wilson's excellent Substack, Dear New Mum) and to accept all the help you can get from others (cue Rosie Spinks' Substack which often focuses on community care). The cake recipe seems excellent, by the way.
Tea cakes 🤤 my favourite and one I baked soooo often when my sons were small.
It might seem like your brain has packed up and gone AWOL, that adult conversations and grown up considerations are a thing of the past. Now your brain is full of child-talk, full of nap time schedules, full of the overwhelm and the gift of motherhood.
It does shift back, I promise 🙏🏻 my sons are 21 & 24 now and I am (somewhat) back into a fully functioning non-child oriented brain. But I think there’s a corner of the brain that clings onto that ‘baby brain’ part of us. Maybe that’s for if and when we have grandchildren.
But I’m DEFINITELY not ready for that yet!! 😁