The fundamentals of home economics ensured that homemade cooking was as much a necessity in our family home as it was a creative art. I remember well that special sound of mum’s Sunbeam mixmaster beating up yet another batch of her famous Anzac biscuits. As a kid I knew that it was important to respond to that sound with haste, otherwise you simply ended up with the spoon to lick rather than the much sought after beaters or the highly prized bowl there were five other competing siblings remember! Anyway us kid were so inspired by mum’s creative cooking craft that we decided to apply our collective intellect to a few kid’s signature dishes as well – honeycomb and ginger beer. Now I am pretty sure that it was the other Marooka “Bar-scar-villes” that instigated the quest for the perfect honeycomb. Their team was led by that budding science professor Straight As student, Cousin John. Like Dr. Heckle in his lab, John would add the necessary ingredients in exacting proportions to the baking mix to insure a product outcome somewhat resembling the stuff found in a popular confectionery of the time called the “Violet Crumble Bar”. Sadly, when the instructions were transferred to the Baskerville family at The Gap via me, I must have missed some vital steps in the interpretation. See, our first attempts at honeycomb created a certain swirling orange road tar which when consumed produced a kind of “lock-jaw” reaction in the “guinea pig” younger siblings engaged by us as market samplers. Not good for their palette not good for their dental work either. So, the natural overreaction was the addition of more rising ingredients – too much rising ingredients! Now, I am not sure how we got the hot molten exploded goo off the ceiling before mum came home that day but we must have managed it somehow because she still knows nothing of our rocket science attempts to this day. I think the ultimate consensus we reached was to invite ourselves over to Cousin John’s place whenever we felt the urge for that sticky sickly sweet. Still, I must say that our attempt at homemade ginger beer met with greater success than that violent crumbling stuff. I guess because this time round the whole family, including dad, was involved in the mixing, making, bottling and storing process. Dad had originally brought home a ginger beer making kit with written production process instructions that he could verbalize to us “keen-to-create” kids. I am sure that we added the right quantity when we were told to add mixed in a clockwise direction when he said to mix poured into bottles when we were told to pour, but you know folks for all that exactness – those ginger beer bottles were all different, they were all individuals. Now some good bottles behaved precisely as the instructions said, “with a moderate effervescence of escaping fermentation gasses upon release”. Some however just went PPPHHHFFF reacting like some dead drained dishwater. Now while our home brew carried a striking visual resemblance to my dishwater allegory, I thought it was poor form for the homemade brew to behave like it as well. Some bottles even choice to empty half of their contents onto the dinner table in a convulsing act of aggression upon opening and some very naughty ones exploded in the fridge one morning at about 3am. Luckily, Mum & Dad had been previously allocated the clean up duties by us kids in the family ginger beer production process. Well this particularly unreliable characteristic of our home made ginger beer meant that it was a requirement by mum that every bottle be first presented to our neighbors outside our back door before it was ever permitted to be brought opened to the table for serving. Something I am sure the neighbors appreciated not. I also remember being commanded at one time by brother David to open and deliver another home brew to the table whilst he casually chatted with dad and I begrudgingly did the dishes. So as commanded, I presented a bottle of opened brew to the table and returned to my dishes with a happier disposition knowing full well the inter-brother wars had just moved ahead one point in my favor David’s spitting and spluttering at the sudsy murky taste simply confirmed my point.
