My Simnel cake is in the oven so I am writing this post surrounded by the delicious scent of baking: a heady mixture of sugar, spice and almond. I love any baking with almonds in and will happily eat Cherry and Almond Cake, Bakewell Tart and Battenburg Cake until the cows come home. I've never made a Battenburg but I do bake a Simnel Cake each Easter.
I like the traditions that we have at various holidays, Easter and Good Friday especially. On Good Friday, we are up early and have Saffron buns for breakfast. In our family it's always been Saffron buns instead of the Hot Cross Buns and although I like the mixed spice flavour of a Hot Cross Bun I still prefer the Cornish saffron bun.
In Cornwall it is traditional to go trigging on Good Friday. Trigging is where everyone heads to the coast to collect shellfish, so after breakfast we don our oldest and dirties clothes and head off to the Helford, picking up pasties for our lunch on the way.
The Helford is a seawater estuary whose muddy shore is perfect for collecting cockles. At low tide everyone heads there armed with buckets, welly boots and garden forks. Sometimes you can see the edge of the cockles lying exposed, but generally they are hiding just below the surface of the silty mud. To find them the trick is to drag the garden fork gently across the surface of the mud and look out for the tell-tale squirt that shows where Mr Cockle is hiding. For some reason the cockle thinks that if his gloopy home is about to be invaded he should send a little jet of water up to try and put predators off, unfortunately for him it actually lets the hunter know where he is. It is then just a case of digging down just below the surface, only about a centimetre, and uncovering him and popping him into the bucket.
Sounds simple enough doesn't it? Well it's not. Remember I said that the Helford was muddy? Well its really muddy: squelchy, sticky, up to the top of your boots muddy. Slippy, smelly and able to pull you down beneath the surface muddy, or at least that's what it feels like. You have to wade out into this mire risking losing your wellies which are so clogged up with mud that they weigh at least a ton each, only to then get squirted in the eye with dirty seawater by the cunning cockle.
The other problem that I have with trigging is that once you've found the pesky little bivalve you have to get him into the bucket. Ok cockles don't bite or run away but they are really dirty and I hate getting my hands mucky at the best of times. So these days I tend to find one token cockle just to say that I've done it and then sit on the sandy area above the tide line with Billy dog as there is no way I am letting him onto that mud.
We lunch on our pasties which have been kept warm by being wrapped in tea towels and try not to eat too much mud which is still clinging to our hands (well every one else's, not mine). Then after lunch we walk around Frenchman's Creek, the setting for one of Daphne du Mauriers novels and one of my favourite books and walk. The cockles meanwhile are left in the shadow of the car so that they don't get too warm and to try and keep them out of sight of the possible cockle rustlers that might be on the prowl.
After our walk it's home to get changed into mud free clothes, have a cup of tea, a game of Boggle and then fish for dinner.
As I said at the start of this post, I love traditions, so think of me on Friday, muddier than Glastonbury, risking life and limb to hunt the elusive cockle, literally combing the mud for dinner and trying to race ahead of the incoming tide. Wait a minute I've just remembered I won't actually be doing that, I'll be the one reading my book in the sun watching everyone else up to their eyes in mud. I do think that it's important to change with the times and to create new family traditions, don't you? So whether you're covered in mud, with family or off to pastures new, eating saffron or hot cross buns, pasties and Simnel cake or something more exotic I hope you all have a very Happy Easter.
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