Level 2 Chi Kung.
Nick off on a bike ride and I’m on morning but, shock horror, after all the tortilla making etc there was only one egg left in the fridge – so no gingerbread pancakes! Poor Dash, who had been looking forward to pancakes all week, had to make do with crumpets for breakfast.
Weeks ago, Katie presented me with a beautifully drawn design for her birthday cake, with views from several angles. To my horror, the drawing showed an elaborate two-tier construction, with the bottom layer grass green and decorated with flowers, and the top layer sky blue, decorated with butterflies. Notes to the side of the page specified that one cake should be chocolate and the other Victoria sponge, and the icing should be mint-chocolate flavoured (beats me how you get mint-choc icing sky blue). I blame Great British Bake Off! This was clearly a case for division of labour – so I agreed with Nick that I will produce the cakes and he (much more artistic and steadier of hand) will take care of the icing. To help things along, after we had finished the party bag shopping yesterday, Katie and I went to Sainsbury’s and picked up ready-roll icing in 5 different colours, some edible silver balls and (just in case of disaster) some ready-made wafer butterflies.
The next challenge was to find a chocolate cake recipe which would be palatable to the children (unlike my usual very rich Devil’s Food Cake recipe. Since I hate pale, wishy washy chocolate cake, I had difficulty thinking of what I should google: ‘not very good chocolate cake’, ‘slightly chocolatey cake’? I finally had some success with ‘children’s chocolate sponge cake’. The resulting cakes look suitably pale, so hopefully they will do the job.