Read and Cook with Robbie Cheadle – The Willows by Algernon Blackwood and Speculaas Cake with Raspberry and Butterscotch a la Robbie #baking #bookreview #fiction

This month, my featured book is The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. This book was recommended to me by talented author, Audrey Driscoll. You can find Audrey on her blog here: https://audreydriscoll.com/2025/05/11/one-book-two-books-three-or-more/

The Willows is the story of two friends, the narrator and his companion, called ‘the Swede”, who embark on a canoe journey down the Danube River. As they approach an isolated region, they are warned by the locals to turn back, but they continue, believing the locals to be superstitious peasants. Their adventure quickly turns from an ordinary camping trip into a confrontation with an ancient, elemental force that appears to have been awakened by their intruding into its remote and peaceful territory.

The force that besieges the canoers remains mysterious and undefined throughout the story, thereby heightening the tension and creepiness especially as the two men’s perceptions of what they are seeing and experiencing differ.

This difference in perception is illustrated by the following short extract:

““Good heavens, it’s a man’s body!” he cried excitedly. “Look!”

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

“An otter, by gad!” we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.”

The narrator describes himself as being the more imaginative of the pair and rather included to overdramatise situations. The Swede is depicted as a pragmatic and sensible fellow with little to no imagination. As the story progresses, however, the Swede is the first of the pair to acknowledge that there are strange and unnatural forces at play. This narrator is the one who attempts to explain away all the peculiar things that are happening.

The bread goes missing and the narrator tries to explain it away as follows:

““How criminally stupid of me!” I cried, still determined to be consistent and find an explanation. “I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it lying on the counter or –“

“The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning,” the Swede interrupted.a

Why in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.”

This role reversal and the narrator’s increasing agitation amid desperate attempts to explain away all the mysteries adds to the dread.

This story is very unsettling and at the end, the reader is left unsure whether any strange occurrences actually took place or whether the creepy surroundings and natural elements like the wind and water unsettled the pairs minds to an extent that they imagined the entire episode. This sense of uncertainty by the reader is created by paragraphs such as the following:

“And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.”

An extraordinary novella that will appeal to readers of dark psychological horror stories that expose how reason and sense can be worn down by terror.  

You can download The Willows by Algernon Blackwood here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11438

Picture caption: Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows by https://www.deviantart.com/mgkellermeyer on @DeviantArtSpeculaas Cake with Raspberry and Butterscotch a la Robbie

I found a recipe for this cake in a magazine. I liked the idea but preferred my own spice cake recipe. The recipes below are the result of my experimenting.

German Spice Cake recipe

Prepare two cake tins, one slightly smaller than the other. Line the bottoms with baking paper and use a non-stick spray for the sides.

Picture caption: My two German spice cakes after they came out of the oven

Pre-heat the oven to 180 C.

Ingredients

1 kilogram cake flour

10 ml salt

320 ml castor sugar

6 ml bicarbonate of soda

20 ml baking powder

10 ml ground cinnamon

10 ml ground ginger

5 ml ground cloves

5 ml ground black pepper

5 ml ground nutmeg

250 grams butter

350 ml golden syrup

160 ml hot water

2 egggs

300 ml double thick yogurt

Method

Sieve all the dry ingredients together into a mixing bowl. Heat the butter, syrup and water together until everything is melted. Beat the eggs and add to the yogurt. Mix into the dry ingredients and then add the butter mixture. Mix until all the lumps are gone.

Bake for 45 – 60 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean.

Picture caption: My final decorated Speculaas cake with Raspberry and ButterscotchThe Raspberry icing

Ingredients

200 grams frozen raspberries

30 ml lemon juice

400 grams icing sugar, sifted (confectioners sugar)

200 grams butter

Method

Place the frozen raspberries in a pot with the lemon juice and simmer until you have a pulp (about 10 minutes). Strain the mixture to remove the raspberry seeds and pulp. Beat the icing sugar into the softened butter until smooth. Add the raspberry juice and beat until completely combined. Refrigerate until soft but solid.

Butterscotch icing

Ingredients

250 grams full-cream smooth cream cheese

250 grams tinned caramel

Beat the caramel and the cream cheese until smooth.

Assembly

I used the raspberry icing to stick the two cakes together, the smaller cake on top of the bigger cake. I then layered the butterscotch icing over the top and along the front and back of the two cakes leaving gaps at the sides. Where the two cakes joined, I used icing to fill the gap and make the icing smooth. I then layered the raspberry icing along the sides of the cakes, filling the gaps. I decorated my cake with Easter eggs.