Cake

The other day, my daughter told me she wants to be on Junior Bake-Off and asked if I would teach her to bake. I love to see lofty ambition in a child, so naturally said yes and spent the next few nights planning a full childhood baking syllabus, beginning with the Victoria Sandwich and moving gently through to coffee cake, chocolate cake, lemon drizzle cake, black forest gateau, meringues, scones, muffins, bread rolls and so on for the next fifteen years until finally, at twenty-one, she'd be able to build  her own mortgage-free, climate-change resistant home out of gingerbread and everlasting gobstoppers.

'I want to make a five-layer wedding cake,' she announced this morning, and began taking all the tins out of the cupboard and stacking them in demonstration of her own particular vision of a multi-layered wedding cake. There were sandwich tins and loaf tins and tins of the same size, all going on infinitely (it seemed, from where I stood), to be topped in the end with something the size of a miniature muffin.

I came over uncharacteristically OCD at this point, and started flipping out at the thought of anyone attempting a multi-tiered cake before they had mastered the Victoria Sandwich. In my head, the issue took on all the magnitude of a global terror threat. She had to make a Victoria Sandwich cake, otherwise how could she ever progress, slowly but surely, to the future-proof house? In fact, how could she ever learn anything effectively if she wanted to start with the work of the experts? I had visions of my ambitious (yet simultaneously deeply reluctant) daughter, forever knowing nothing because she'd started out knowing everything. I think I might have given her a talking-to about this that has probably scarred her for life at the same time as being wholly futile. *Turns face away from memory. Prefers to forget maternal failings.*

Anyway, she bent to my will eventually and made a Victoria Sandwich cake. Oh, the joy! Oh, the deep, pure and uncomplicated joy of my realisation that CAKE CONTAINS NO PLASTIC. Look:-

Sugar (in a paper bag)
Flour (in a paper bag)
Butter (in metal wrap stuff)
Eggs (in a box)
Milk (from a bottle)
Vanilla (from an ancient pod that happened to be kicking around a shelf instead of a plastic bottle)
Jam
Icing sugar

Never mind that paper bags and the metal wrap for butter are unique environmental disasters in themselves, THERE WAS NO FUCKING PLASTIC.

My daughter made the cake. I stood on the sidelines giving the occasional direction ('no, two tins are enough'), happy in the knowledge that I could eat this sugary shit with zero plastic guilt. She was happy because she was high on cake mixture. The room filled with the odour of rising vanilla sponge and mother-daughter bonding. Some people came to view the house. They got the love vibe, I'm sure.

We went to the allotment to water the lettuces and spring onions. We picked blackberries. She said, 'Can I put blackberries on the cake?'

Part of my heart fell out of my arse at the thought of this tampering with the Victoria Sandwich and what it might mean for her ability to make steady progress in all areas of her education, but then all of a sudden I got over it and said, 'Yes. Do whatever you want.'

So this is it:

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but the top has been moved backward to allow for a platform for the blackberries. Or something.

You will see that a lot of this cake has been eaten. It was mostly by me. It was plastic free. It was dinner. Half a cake and a corn on the cob.

Life is great.