… Isn’t there? Seriously. What’s with the cake? There’s cake for birthdays. There’s cake for anniversaries. For Christmas (BTW ours is made for the year and sitting there. I might’ve, just might’ve had a piece. What??). For all sorts of people getting together events. There’s even a whole business in borderline obscene cakes for bachelor and bachelorette parties (*cough* I’ve heard). So what’s the deal I ask myself?
In my family we learned to bake at approximately the same time that we learned nursery rhymes. First we watched. Then we licked the bowl after the cake was made (which in today’s world would cause the biggest scandal wouldn’t it? Salmonella. Children. Blah blah blah). And watched with wide-open eyes as the cake baked. Back then the only oven available and easily affordable where I’m from was a round one with the heating coil in the lid. The cake went in the middle and you could see it through a glass window at the top. I don’t think it even had a temperature control. My theory is that this was a conspiracy from the religious leaders to get us to pray!
And no, don’t jump to any conclusions about me being a hundred and fifty; I just didn’t grow up in the western world :P. Later as we got to 6 and 7, we got to hold the stirring spoon and even measure out ingredients on a good day. Great way of learning your sums methinks (others may say that’s probably why I’m absolutely crap at math!). Pretty soon we got good at it, naturally. I even briefly made a living out of it! That was, I must say, the most stress free time of my life (even with the crazy deadlines, and the fact that the word ‘sinking’ in a sentence rarely referred to anything emotional).
All our kiddie birthday cakes were home-baked. With intricate attention to detail. Wondrous fantasy creations that would make any little girl smile. If my mum had had boys, I’m pretty sure there’d have been some Lightening McQueen/SpongeBob-esque elements in there (you see back then things were comfortably gender skewed… more recently, little boys prefer Ariel to Batman and their mums are ok with it. That’s awesome isn’t it?! But I digress…)
When I look back at the pictures now, they’re far from perfect. The spot where the icing bag missed. The edge that’s ever so slightly wonky. The slight blotchiness on the colour. Nothing compared to the glamorous, sugar confections that kids today get. But who cared? To me, and the rest of my kin I now see, cake = love. And so it appears to be to a lot of the world from the sounds of it!
Now as Christmas looms, with me feeling under the weather; a baby that’s just had her shots and is doing the crankies and of course a guest list (that that includes half the free world) to feed in exactly 48 hours… I tell myself: at least there’s cake! And I smile.
Merry Christmas people. We put extra b**ze in our cake J. I need it!
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