It isn't often I get the chance to ice a chocolate cake with my coat on, I'm pleased to say. There's something about it that hampers creativity.
The chain of events leading to this unusual choice of protective clothing was fairly straightforward.
- Offer to make chocolate cake for one of the couples we are meeting for dinner, as each had their birthdays last week.
- Put off making cake in order to stroll into town with husband. (Specifically to aggravate son, now earning obscene amounts of dosh doing Saturday job in baker's shop from which we are naturally banned, so must content ourselves with sliding past as often as possible and peering through steamy windows in order to make him realise that forbidding us to buy morning goods is no bar to our causing him untold embarrassment.)
- Put off making cake because, having not bought bread from outraged, red-faced son, we have instead contented ourselves with buying fifteen stone of Saturday papers and must read them front to back.
- Put off making cake because exhausted from reading papers. I appear to have read the Family Guide to ISAs without realising it wasn't the magazine section. Quite obviously I need a restorative nap.
I didn't so much enjoy several winks, I was more coshed by the Baseball Bat of Morpheus so, three hours later and having been lovingly woken by my husband - "I didn't wake you – I re-animated you. It's different." - I staggered downstairs and ram-raided the kitchen.
I think where I went wrong was in congratulating myself on being able to turn out a cake so quickly that I had time to do the washing-up and change before calling out to my spouse that he ought to get a move on, or we'd be late.
Had I not been such a victim of my own vanity, I would perhaps have remembered that I hadn't iced the damn thing. I only realised this when I swept into the kitchen, majestically accoutred in ankle-length woollen coat, we now being in the frozen grip of an English Summer, in order to collect the festive offering. It was still in two halves on the cooling rack, next to the bowl of obscenely rich frosting - now reduced in quantity by several fingersful and for which I take full responsibility. No one in their right mind should wander upstairs for a nap leaving a recently-teased purveyor of French sticks near a bowlful of chocolate fudge icing without fully expecting the obvious consequences.
Undaunted, I set to with manic ferocity. There should be medals available for occasions like this. "For Icing a Cake in Three Minutes Wearing Ridiculously Unsuitable Outer Garments, the gold medal is awarded to Valerie King. Mr Biggleswade gets the silver for Making a Batch of Scones in a Wetsuit and Mrs Figgins has been asked to leave. Matron will award the prizes when she distributes cocoa."
The freshly-iced tribute was bundled into cling-film and my husband, employing the accelerator-booting action for which he is justly famous, drove us to Chipping Sodbury at – darling, why have you taken the needle off the speedometer?
We arrived at the restaurant no more than three minutes behind the others. The greeting ritual took a bit longer than usual, but I just put that down to having chocolate fudge icing in my eyebrows. (At least, I profoundly hope that being sucked 'hello' isn't going to replace the more traditional and seemly 'mwah' as a convention...)
Mind you, I do wish we had been on time. Sophisticated professionals as our friends are, a heated argument was already raging about how to decline 'scrotum' in Latin and I'm keen to know how it started.
