It all started when my daughter came home from school with the news that she needed to take a cake the next day for sharing with the class. Well, no, it actually started when I discovered that I had no talent for cooking, but it was accentuated with the news that I needed to make a cake for my daughter’s sharing event.
First step: find a recipe; my organisational skills are only marginally better than my cooking skills, but I found it. Next step: follow the recipe. That seemed fairly straight forward, until I got to the part that said ‘Self-Raising Flour’. A thorough search of the pantry produced a packet of plain flour, but no self-raising flour. No problem, I thought. Now this is where some basic skill in cooking would have helped, because I would have known that self-raising flour is for the purpose of making the baked item rise.
So when the bell on the oven signalled the end of the cooking time, I nonchalantly opened the oven door with the intention of taking the cake out. I think the term ‘stunned-mullet’ would best describe my face at that moment. There was no cake, in the normal sense of the word, in there. Instead, a rather flat slab confronted me.
Knowing there was no time, or opportunity, to buy a cake in time for the classroom event, I cut the slab and gave it the taste test. Hmmm, not bad; it had a kind of ‘biscuity’ texture and taste, so I decided to ‘re-badge’ it. I sliced that slab up, turned to my daughter and said “Don’t tell anyone it was meant to be a cake! Just tell them we wanted to make something different, so we made biscuits”.
I still can’t cook cakes – so I don’t. There’s always a bakery somewhere that can get me out of trouble.
Cake
The Gypsy In Me 