Tonight I made pattycakes. Despite my best efforts, they are terrible. Rock hard on top and unpleasantly sweet (the latter a fault of the mix manufacturers, but a fault nonethless), they are less cakes than tiny, chocolate-coated bongos. I cannot eat a bongo.

What is worse, these cakes were not meant to be chocolate-covered! Do you know how long it takes to whip cream by hand with a spoon? Approximately three times as long as I was comfortable with. And I put too much sugar in. But all of this is bearable. I was beating along, taking good care not to curdle the cream by overworking it, when I looked down and before my eyes the cream was curdled by my over-working it.

My initial plan for butterfly cakes, gone.

I suppose the cakes were cursed from the start. The first bottle of cream that I bought turned-out to be off. Then I went to the shop to buy more cream, but they had none. So I went to the service station and bought some cream there. It was off. They let me exchange it, but it was tooth-and-nail for a while there.

In story books, such hardship would of course lead to my discovering that the hideous cakes were in fact enchanted, and that by eating them I would grow several stories tall or be whisked into an alternate dimension where jazz tap replaced calculus at an early stage of human history. But that was not to be.

I am left, alone and woeful, to drum a down-tempo rhythm of mourning on these icing-laden latin percussion instruments. This is a sad day for confectioners everywhere.

Tags: cooking, delusions of grandeur
Current Mood: despairing
Current Music: Richard Harris - MacArthur Park