Followers

Tuesday 11 November 2008

8. Let Them Eat Cake


Memory is a funny old thing. Not only do I remember the train-shaped cake my mother lovingly crafted for my (then) eight-year-old brother, but my memory of it is so charged that I dreamed of making one for my son one day. When I became the mother of girls, my memory morphed into daydreams and I longed for them to be big enough to gasp at the pink turrets on top of the fairy castle that I alone would carve from whatever I found around the house. The fact that I can’t even draw a turret (or a fairy) didn’t spoil my fantasies and when the day came that Ellie, already sewn into a pink tutu, turned four, I rolled my sleeves up and my ready-made icing out onto the kitchen table with a smug grin shaped from genes of a super-mother.

When I asked my mother about the train-cake, she had no memory of it. My father, who can remember every tiniest detail of his life, looked blank. My mother told me that my brother had also denied any knowledge.

I was rocked. If this super-mother memory was a fantasy from the first, then what else wasn’t real? I didn’t dare ask about the lullabies or the long journey take-a turn story-telling that I think I inherited. What about the talking toys? The Johnny Morris-voiced puppy? There was a chance, I realised, that I had made my whole childhood up.

I dusted myself down and frantically rattled through the pieces of my children’s past to see what might fit. I chanced upon the moment last year when LouLou revealed herself to be the sum of our family parts (or what I thought they were then). I had taken her to see Georgia Bing, author of the Molly Moon books, at the Brighton Festival and she was mesmerised (that’s an in-joke for Molly Moon fans). She leant across to me and whispered in my ear; “When I grow up, I’m growing to write children’s stories like Georgia Bing and Grandpa.” While I blushed with pride, she leant over again and, with eyes still burning into her new heroine, added “or become a professional cake maker”.

So when her tenth birthday approached in October, I promised her a proper cake, thinking more of building tiers and turrets like I had done when she was little rather than hiring in some help. But LouLou wasn’t looking for just a cake; she was looking for a mentor and set about scouring the autumn food festivals for someone who would fit the bill.

At Chiddingly, she found her. Emerging from the cake tent beaming, she led me silently by the hand to Lizzy Harman and her Little Village Cake Company stall, featuring a stunning rose-covered wedding cake, and proclaimed her journey had come to an end.

I blanched at the price and took Lizzy aside.

A few weeks later, LouLou’s birthday arrived and we piled her in the car with big sister and sleepover chum and drove her to a kitchen in the country for her secret birthday treat. She didn’t immediately recognise Lizzy who sat her down amid colouring agents and peacock feathers, but as the penny dropped, her excitement grew and they set to work.

There’s something wonderfully timeless about making cakes, and three hours disappeared in a haze of petal-making, bowl-licking, icing-colouring bliss. The girls busied themselves with cutting out daisies and polka dots while the kitchen filled with the sweet smell of warm cake until magically, the squidgy yellow mess was transformed into a smoothly iced hat-cake.
The table was cleared for the finale. Polka dots spotted the yellow icing and tiny cupcakes, topped with delicate daisies, circled the brim of her birthday bonnet.

LouLou’s smile was something out of Alice in Wonderland, and when Lizzy asked her to place the peacock feather in the centre of the hat-cake, I knew that it didn’t matter anymore whether or not my mother really had made a train-cake. LouLou will tell her children wonderful home-made stories and make them cakes laden with flowers and feathers when she grows up. She will very probably never remember the fairy castle that I made when she was almost one but I don’t care; she will remember the peacock-cake as having something to do with me. And as her memory and her daydreams collide, it will probably be me that made it for her tenth birthday, and me that becomes the super-mum whose mantle she will one day inherit. The fact that my cakes turn out like biscuits and my turrets are made of loo rolls need never be part of the story she grows up to tell.