“Mummy, I’d like the merry-go-round cake from the cake book for my birthday party,” my daughter says.
“This cake is not difficult. It is however time-consuming.”
In a large mixing bowl add equal measures of:
- The sparkly hopes and dreams of a six-year-old
- The high expectations created by the other mums’ party cakes
- Engineering and decorating skills that are optimistic at best
- Add two tablespoons of blind faith
- Sprinkle with three parts love and one part guilt.
Beat enthusiastically, divide into two not-quite-the-same-size cake tins and place to bake in a three hour window when children have finally gone to bed.
Drink one glass of wine whilst re-reading simple assembly instructions.
Remove cakes from oven and wait impatiently for them to cool in the now two hour window.
Slather warm cakes with buttercream and fondant. Place one dense and quite heavy cake atop the other quite dense and heavy cake, holding it in place with one cardboard kitchen roll tube and eight beribboned wooden BBQ skewers. Enjoy wielding the glue gun to fix an appropriately coloured wooden horse at the bottom of each skewer.
Pour another glass of wine and admire this feat of engineering. Ignore the slight list to the left-hand side, as surely the rest of the decorations will hide that?
Individually tweezer into place two hundred little metallic balls to represent the lights on the carousel in a pattern clearly designed by someone who has never actually made this cake.
Realise that five hours of the original three hour window have now passed and the little metallic balls are multiplying. Four hundred more need to be placed before the cake is finished.
Drink more wine, eat left-over buttercream and feel nauseous. Wonder if the list looks worse than it did before? Cry.
Begin to place eight hundred little metallic balls onto base cake in a slightly different, but still fiendishly complicated, pattern.
Awake from fever dream in which the eight tiny little wooden horses, still attached to their beribboned wooden skewers, have escaped the cake and are now twirling enthusiastically around the kitchen, accompanied by the wheezy strains of an old-fashioned Wurlitzer organ whilst little metallic balls rain down from the sky.
Corral the horses into a corner and, one by one, plunge them kicking and whinnying into the gloopy buttercream until their tiny little hooves stop beating and they are quite, quite still.
Continue grimly sticking one million stupid little metallic balls into the sodding icing, any attempt at pattern long gone.
Finish wine as the sun rises majestically in the sky and ceremoniously bin any remaining little metallic balls.
Spend birthday party itself in an exhausted haze, waking to see the cake admired for precisely one minute before having to cut it into 30 pieces to the soundtrack of squabbling children. Die a tiny little bit inside.
Next year hide the cake book three months before smallest’s birthday and feign sadness at its loss. Suggest a Colin Cake. Cry tears of joy when mass-produced chocolate-smothered insect larva is approved.
Illustration created with human imagination and artificial intelligence.