Dalyan – 23rd December

I should have been up early on Saturday 23rd December as I wanted to make a Christmas cake for the beach party tomorrow. Josh and Martha had brought the cheddar cheese for us to take and the idea was to put it with fruit cake as our offering at the buffet style free for all. It being Dalyan, I had kind of left it a bit late but was not unduly worried as I’d found a cheat recipe which could be done in the slow cooker. Josh bought croissants for breakfast and I had that before we all went to the market. We were still wandering round the market at 12.30pm and I’d managed to buy some extra dried fruit. My mom had already got me 5 140g packets of sultanas from Migros when she went to Fethiye. They didn’t have the usual dried fruit stand in the Erasta shopping centre so she’d got me the next best thing when I asked her. I still needed 300g of other dried fruit so I bought dates, currants and apricots which cost a whopping 235 lira (£6.35). I think the stall holder had seen me coming and had our pants down there!
At 3pm I read the instructions for the cake making and realised I didn’t have one of the 4 vital ingredients so Captain Caveman and I went off to Migros.
I bumped in to Ozzy, a Turkish friend, which was lucky as I have no experience (in any country) of buying 2 cups worth of chocolate milk. Ozzy helped me choose the right carton and it cost 45.90 lira (£1.24) for a litre.

It wasn’t until almost 5pm that I noticed the instructions for the cake said to soak 1kg of dried fruit in the 2 cups of chocolate milk and three quarters of a cup of Bailey’s for 24 hours! Ooops. I popped it in a bowl and then started preparing for a soirée/curry night, a glass of residual Baileys on the go. There were Josh, Martha, Jamie, Captain Caveman and I for dinner so the tables had to be moved to fit the 5 of us in. Captain Caveman was playing Bridge on his phone and got annoyed at having to help move furniture and didn’t see why it had to be done yet. I wanted to be organised so that I could get on with the vegan and the chicken curries, get enough rice in my cooker for 5 and not forget the naan bread. Before putting the Baileys away, I had another one – I’d forgotten how moreish it was.
The curry night went well with some of the diners having thirds and I did forget the naan bread.
I didn’t take any photos because I was too busy trying to make sure everyone was ok but by the time we’d finished I decided to fold the flour in to my soaked dried fruit. Licking the spoon from that mixture was a bit boozy and I wasn’t convinced it would turn out well enough as they don’t have self raising flour here. I didn’t have any baking powder either so I used Bicarbonate of Soda and a bit of lemon juice – which is meant to be an exact measurement but by now I’d had too many wines and Baileys to care. Jamie took photos and posted on Facebook about my culinary first and I wasn’t surprised to hear that not many people had faith in my efforts.
It was meant to take 7 hours on low so we set a timer to turn it on at midnight, and an alarm for 7am tomorrow to turn it off. As one of our friends on Facebook asked; ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

Photo credit – Jamie