Madron 2018

Yesterday was Madron, also known as Mabon and the Autumn Equinox. Or Saturday depending on your time zone, as I mentioned in my Celebrating Madron and Autumn post, the actual equinox time and date in the UK was 2.54am on Sunday 23rd Sept, but in the US it was 9.54pm EST on Saturday the 22nd.

My main celebration was baking a ginger spice cake. It was based on this spiced wacky cake recipe: https://www.thecountrycook.net/spiced-wacky-cake/ 

Update 15/9/21: The Country Cook recipe is now gone but you can find a somewhat similar one here (no pumpkin spice in this one): https://thebestcakerecipes.com/spice-crazy-cake/

I'd had the recipe saved on Pinterest for a while so this was a good opportunity to use it! I didn't know what a wacky cake was, but on the site Brandie explains that they're also called Depression-era cakes because they were good to make if you didn't have many ingredients in such as eggs, butter and milk. This recipe uses white vinegar and vegetable oil.

The original recipe uses pumpkin spice. I'm not sure if that's widely available in the UK, but there might  be some places that do it. I decided to use ginger and mixed spices instead though, so I put a tablespoon of ginger and mixed spice in (rather than 1TBSP pumpkin spice). The frosting for the spiced wacky cake is a vanilla buttercream one from the Food Network website, but the site itself isn't available in the UK (not sure why!) so I couldn't see the recipe. Rather than make another vanilla frosting I decided to use the cream cheese icing one from the frosted white chocolate Easter cake I've made a few times (most recently this Easter). You can see that recipe here: https://livingseasonal.blogspot.com/2017/04/frosted-white-chocolate-easter-cake.html

I'd previously used the same icing for the ginger beer cake I baked for Madron 2016, so thought it would work. It did go well and the cake itself tastes quite nice. Nice flavour and the ginger and mixed spices aren't too overpowering. The sponge is a bit chewier than some cakes though, maybe because of the oil. Here are a couple of  pics:

The mark is just a hole in the icing!

What it looks like inside

I also made some roasted devilled potatoes later which I had with chicken for my tea (dinner). I got the recipe from a Witch of Lupine Hollow newsletter, which was adapted from this one: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/roasted-deviled-potatoes-231196


In the evening I went up to my favourite local nature reserve to take some photos at sunset. I like to do this on or around some sabbats (mainly those during the warmer months!). I last went up there on Lammas. I had originally planned to go last night but it was raining, so thought I'd have to go another day. But then the weather got better and there was a nice sunset after all. Sunset was around 7pm. Here are a few pics I took:

Sunset on Mill Hill, Shoreham-by-sea

 

I also watched a YouTube video from The White Witch Parlour about celebrating Madron/Mabon and the Tess Whitehurst Fall Equinox Affirmation video from last year (didn't do that one till after midnight, when I remembered, lol).



Hope you had a good Madron! :) It's been really feeling like autumn this past week. Soon it will be October and we'll be properly into autumn. The next sabbat is Samhain, doesn't seem that long since the last one!

Happy Madron/Autumn Equinox! (Or Oestara/Spring Equinox if you're in the Southern Hemisphere!). :)



P.S. I've just posted my monthly gratitude list over on my other blog Falling Petals, and I wrote an extra list for Madron. You can read it here: https://fallingpetalsuk.blogspot.com/2018/09/gratitude-list.html




For more on celebrating autumn in general, check out this post: https://livingseasonal.blogspot.com/2018/09/celebrating-madron-autumn.html