Baking under the influence

WHOOOSH. KERFLUMP! That is the sound of me shooting out of the birthday party organising flume and landing in a crumpled ball of lethargy. I have survived. And can now joyously forget about children's parties until next February. Hoorah.

It all went remarkably fine. Well except for the birthday boy getting so uptight at the prospect of the happy birthday song being sung to him that he came out in a blotchy rash all over his face (or maybe that was just from excessive e-numbers?) I'm not sure why my children hate the birthday song as much as they do. I can't blame them. It's a fairly doleful, cheerless dirge. In fact I think the composer of the song might have been Eyeore.

But besides that, it went swimmingly. The pirates made their pizzas. My kitchen remained remarkably red sauce free, although there is a gentle dusting of flour on the surface of most of the kitchen appliances. My pirate stickers are all untouched as none of the small boys were interested in decorating their pizza boxes. Why would you when you could charge around naked hitting each other with balloons instead? The presents were ripped open and muddled up so I have no hope of ever knowing who gave us what. Most of the presents have already lost most of their component parts and we're left with the boxes, which is really all they're interested in anyway.

So all in all, an absolutly exhausting past time, but a success nonetheless. However, there were two small baking incidences that are worth reporting. On Friday night (i.e. birthday party eve) I had finished vaccuming the floors, wrapping pass the parcels, blowing balloons, making pizza boxes and a myriad of other tasks, I thought I'd better knuckle down to make some fairy cakes. However, I had by this time had some wine. Quite a lot in fact.

I opened my baking bible (Nigella's Domestic Goddess) and turned to the fairy cake page, only to find that I'd obviously dropped a lot of icing sugar or cake batter onto the page at some prior baking extravaganza and most of the fairy cake recipe had been obliterated. So I had to resort to a different recipe book. Sob.

I took out my 'How to cook anything' American book as it does what it says on the tin and tells you how to cook anything, including fairy cakes. Except that as this is an American book, a single recipe won't make the standard 12 fairy cakes as a UK recipe will. No, my friends. American recipes will make enough fairy cakes for all the children in my son's school... and their extended families. So I had to at least halve it. I was going to divide by three but that was way beyond my mental abilities after 3 glasses of wine. So I began.

Except that I was foiled at the first hurdle as it called for a stick of butter (or rather helpfully, 8 tablespoons). Now having lived in America, I know they very kindly sell their butter in sticks. They don't do that here. And I didn't quite see how I could scoop 8 tablespoons of hard butter out of a lump and I didn't feel like sticking the whole block in the microwave.

So I googled 'stick of butter' (thank god for google) and came up with the answer. Which was 4 oz. Which I then had to divide. At which point I got a bit lost and guessed. I think I then kept switching between the full and the halved recipe until at last I got the bit calling for two eggs (i.e. one) which had to be separated. I did so and mentally patted myself on the back for not getting yolk into the white and vice versa in my less than sober state. It then said to beat the eggwhites until they reach soft peak stage. That's all well and good if you have more than one egg white. But my big beater just wouldn't work on one egg. And besides, it was already dirty and I wasn't in the mood to wash it.

So I opted to use my handheld blender. I ended up with egg on my face (literally). What remained of the egg white never managed to reach anything remotely close to soft peak stage. it reach frothy on the top with runny underneath, vaguely reminiscent of sperm. I gave up and dumped the lot in the cake mix and said sod it.

Despite that, they rose and tasted fine. I'm not sure how. But they did. There's something to be said for drunk baking (although one does find the kitchen in a bit of a mess the next day).

Having mastered baking under the influence of alcohol, this morning I thought I'd have a go at baking under the influence of a ticking clock. I was meant to bake a cake for my son to take to pre-school today but quite frankly, could not be arsed. So this morning, he asked where his cake was with big doleful eyes. At which point my heart broke and I said: It's coming right up.

So having gotten up at the crack of sparrow fart to open presents, I then had to feed the children, do all the normal before school pandemonium and bake a cake, which I did at warp speed. However, I hadn't quite factored in enough time for the cake to cool. I left it cooling while we sprinted up the road to deposit son 1 at school. I had exactly five minutes once back home to turn two semi warm cakes into something that my son would be proud of. He had requested pink icing, so I liberally smeared pink butter cream frosting between two cakes and smeared even more on the top and sides. Son 2 and I took turns pelting it with smarties and that was that. Perfection. For five seconds.

Then the heat from the cakes began to melt the butter cream and the top cake oozed away from its friend below. Tough, we were late. We set off for pre-school, me driving at 30 miles per hour the whole way. I never realised how many hills there were between our house and the pre-school because everytime we went up one or down one, the cakes would slide ominously apart, threatening to decorate the upholstery with pink frosting.

We got there. The cake looked like a pink, melting leaning tower of pisa, with many fingerprints on one side where I'd valiantly tried to slide the two pieces back together. The staff gave it some sideways glances. But I didn't care. Son 2 thought it was magnificent.

I then raced home, packed in a full day's work in 4 hours, fetched children and the remainder of the cake which by late afternoon had solidfied nicely, and had more small boys around to play in the afternoon to help eat the rest of the cake. Everyone is now in bed. I have a lot of cake washing up stuff to do downstairs. But I have made it through to the other side of the birthday. I'm not sure if I feel more exhausted now, or three years ago having just given birth.

Only how many more years of birthday parties to go???

The Business Link Man is coming. I'm a bit twitchy

I have a vast amount of work to do but I can't settle down and do it. That's because I have a man from Business Link coming to see me in about 15 minutes time. Since setting up my little business 2 years ago, I've yet to get any real expert advice so I'm a little nervous in case the man falls off his chair laughing at me when I start describing the way I work. I think they're trained not to do that. Or at least I hope they are, even if inside they are tutting and clucking at the idiot small business owners they have to meet.

I've written a list of all the things I want to ask him, but I fear that the allocated hour won't get us through more than the top 3 items. I've also printed off my business plan, such as it is, and I've vaccuumed the downstairs bit of the house, put away the toys and cleaned the kitchen in the hope that it projects a professional 'office' environment. Ordinarily I would take him into our drawing room - which is the smart grown up room that is never used - but it is currently filled with piles of clothes destined for a women's refuge shelter and eBay sales. Plus there's the start of a 1000 piece puzzle scattered on the coffee table and which is likely to stay that way until the children leave home. I won't show him my study which looks as though the taliban have been carrying out bomb detonation training classes in it.

I've put some lipstick on and changed out of my slippers and into real shoes. I'm all twitchy. I keep telling myself that this isn't a test. It's not the taxman. He's just a nice government-funded expert to help me grow my business. Yet my heart is racing. I'm not sure what I'm more afraid of. Him telling me that I've been doing everything wrong. Or him telling me that I've been doing everything right and now here's another million things to do. Because I'm just not sure when I'm going to be able to do them. Ordinarily I would say between 2 and 3am, but son 2 seems to have taken that slot with his nightly birthday cake nightmares. Every night he wakes up in a vile temper, flinging his moo moo cow across the room and shouting that I've made the wrong birthday cake. Yesterday I was told that it had to be a dinosaur cake, despite it being a pirate party. I don't know how to make a dinosaur cake. However, I could stick the plastic dino toys into some buttercream icing atop a fairy cake. I wonder if that will cut it?

Sorry, I'm wibbling. Just nervous. Better get off blog and mentally prepare. Practice my birth breathing. Who would have thought it would come in handy so often?

Busy, busy, busy in a tizzy, getting dizzy

I haven't fallen off the planet. The planet just seems to be awfully busy at the moment. Hence the lack of blogging.

What have I been up to then that's kept me so incredibly busy, I hear you ask?

Well, for starters I had to eat a lot of cake over the weekend. I finally got to hold my girly tea party. And it was as girly and frou-frou as I'd hoped it would be. I managed to make a gravity defying three tier cake full of luscious marscapone and blueberries and although we all applied ourselves well, there was still enough cake left over to feed several starving families in Africa. Although I imagine if I was a starving family in Africa, cake with marscapone and blueberries might seem a bit OTT. Anyway, I had to eat my way through a lot of that which left me feeling bloated and ill and in no way capable of blogging.

We also got to go to Beale Park on the weekend. This is one of those places with many small, foreign and very dull animals in cages/pens/paddocks which you battle to find in amongst all the foliage and which the children aren't really overly bothered about seeing anyway. The Hawk Owl made a big impression on the four year old though, and we had to revisit that bit of the park several times, complete with smell of rotting mice that are apparently used to feed it. As if we weren't feeling queasy enough, we got to eat bad food at a cafe to add to the indigestion.

On Monday, I tried to do the workload of four people. And then for evening giggles, I got to do month end accounts. How I love month end. Not. I should really enjoy it, totting up my invoices to see how many pennies I've made before I give it all away to the nursery/childminder/pre-school, but I don't. I have this ridiculous belief that all my clients are going to object to being presented with a bill. I mean I do the work for them, so I have an entirely valid reason for giving them a bill. It's just that I somehow feel guilty about doing it. I'm beginning to think that perhaps I'm not a natural entrepreneur.

On Tuesday I tried to catch up on all the work I should have done on Monday and then my sister arrived with her baby. So that meant lots of time telling my sons that their 7 month old cousin probably doesn't want a loud, roaring dinosaur shoved in her face and that she can't be used as a cushion to bounce on.

Wednesday, I had to pretend to be a good hostess and actually go get some groceries to feed our guests. Nothing like a quick whirl around Sainsbury's for a morning's entertainment. I spent the afternoon with the boys dressed in wellies and raincoats, exploring the track for buried treasure. We found: a trowel someone had left behind (which was very handy really because we needed something to dig up the buried treasure), two power sticks (i.e. two sticks which magically turn into guns and make the noise: POWER! POWER!), a Large Throwing Rock (don't really need to describe what happens with this do I?), a leaf (actually we found about a million of those but for some reason the one we took home was precious), a rusty old buckle (could quite possibly be of roman origin... or not), a pine cone and two acorns. Quite a haul.

And today, I'm back at work, having managed to get older son into big school for his last trial session with only a few bruises on my shins. About to go have a meeting with the head teacher (scary) and tonight - Shock! Horror! Alert the media! - husband and I are actually going out as we have built in babysitters (thanks sis.) What we'll talk about is anyone's guess. Then again we're going to a movie which will cut down on the need to make conversation quite a lot. It's not that we've not got anything to say to each other, it's just that it takes more than a single night out for us to remember how to talk seven types of shite again instead of serious issues like when the lawns next need to be mown and whether to buy sew-on or iron-on name tags for the kids clothes.

Speaking of which, I only have 30 minutes left till I need to be at the school so must run. But as Arnie says: I'll be back.

The art of resting. Or not.

If you'd told me that I could have a whole weekend to sit on my butt and do absolutely nothing I would have thought it was a dream come true. I NEVER get to sit and do nothing.

However, just because I had an ankle the size of Britain that really should have been kept up in the air, didn't excuse me from my maternal duties. I mean, what are you going to do when your 2 year old yells: 'I need to pee mummy!' while doing his little wiggly bottom dance which means pee is imminent? Husband was mowing the lawn as our newly recruited teenage lawn mower decided that after doing it once he really couldn't be arsed to return. So of course I had to get up and hobble to the loo (about 60 times). And then there were all the fights induced by boredom, which needed to be broken up all while trying to keep my ankle out of the fray.

There was the lack of anything to eat due to no grocery shopping getting done, so at some point I resigned myself to baking a cake just so that the children could have something to look forward to/stick in their gobs to keep quiet for a few moments. Only, I didn't quite think that through, so once the chocolate and sugar kicked in, the fights and bouncing and general mayhem increased ten-fold. Never has bedtime been so appealing.

Also, sitting on your bum all weekend is vastly over-rated. It might not have been had I been able to watch things on tv that I was interested in instead of Cbeebies. Or if I'd been able to read a book or magazine in peace. Or even had I been allowed to surf the interweb on my laptop without clamours for 'my spelling game' (which for any parents out there is a cunning website called http://www.starfall.com/ that is entirely free and teaches children to read albeit with an American accent).

But obviously none of those things happened. So sitting on my bum actually sucked. What's more, it's pretty boring which meant I ate lots of the aforementioned chocolate cake. And not being able to move and burn off any calories means that my arse and thighs have doubled in size, much like my ankle.

This morning I had to attempt to drive a car with my poorly foot so that I could get the boys to nursery. It wasn't good. Pushing the accelerator down was fine. Lifting it back up again wasn't great. So changing gears involved a lot of unnecessary revving. And then there was the swivelling of my foot sideways to get to the break pedal. Not good. Luckily the children aren't yet old enough to commentate on my driving skills although there were several chirps from the back along the lines of 'Go faster mummy. This is boring'. Not from where I was sitting it wasn't.

Anyway, must attempt to get back into work mode although the peace and tranquility of the empty house is strongly suggesting that perhaps I should do what I should have done all weekend. Put my feet up and rest.