A Piece of Cake

Question: When is a piece of cake NOT a piece of cake?

Answer: When it involves the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake book.

I was thrown into part-time parenthood seven years ago when I married my husband and scored myself an instant family in the form of Rick’s beautiful four-year-old son Jacob.

As the youngest of four children – and with no extended family living in the area – I had little experience of looking after kids.

 What I did have experience of – as the youngest of four children – was years of birthday cakes, chosen from the hallowed pages of said birthday cake book and realised, ever so capably, by my mother.

It seemed simple. You pick a design, you place an “order” with mum and voila, it appears, as though straight out of the pages of the classic cook book, on the day of your birthday.

How hard could it be?

The year after getting married, I decided it was my duty to bake a cake for Jake’s 5th birthday.

The kid loved Thomas the Tank Engine. And I’m talking a full-on, certifiable obsession with that bloody blue steam train. Clothes, toys, books, a beanbag and a blanket, not to mention the videos (yes, videos – so old school), which he would ask to watch over and over and over and over and over and over and … well, you get my point.

To this day I still shudder any time I hear the opening few bars of the theme song.

His passion for all things train-related did, however, provide me with the perfect inspiration for his cake and so straight to mum and dad’s I headed to borrow the birthday cake bible.

My challenge: to pull off the mother of all Women’s Weekly cakes, the cover star itself – the Choo Choo Train.

I had wonderful memories of the creation, having enjoyed it for my birthday when I was about 9.

Mmmm … the Mint Slice wheels, the jam sponge engine, the popcorn-filled carriages … a true masterpiece of cake and confectionary combined.

Armed with an inexplicable sense that it would be an unqualified success, I set to work, mixing and baking the requisite cakes.

Of course, waiting until Jake went to bed at 8.30pm – so it would be a surprise – was always going to be a recipe for disaster.

By the time the cakes were baked and cooled it was already well on the way to 10pm.

By the time I’d realised cutting rectangle cakes into smaller rectangle cakes to make the carriages and engine was well beyond my – apparently meagre – skills, the clock had reached 10.30pm.

And then came the decorating.

Word to the wise: low fat margarine is NOT the same as butter.

Not in taste, not in consistency and not in its ability to produce the perfect vienna cream.

Or even a less than perfect vienna cream.

And here’s another tip – adding more and more red and blue food colouring to get just the right shade of purple won’t produce the right shade of purple.

But if you’re in the market for a speckled, greyish icing so chock full of colouring it could stain a surface from a hundred paces … well I’m your girl.

Suffice to say, at a time on the wrong side of midnight, the cake was complete – well, complete minus a few details.

Like the licorice to mark out the tops of the carriages, engine and train tracks (I’m not a licorice eater so obviously I subconsciously blocked it from memory when I went shopping for the supplies).

Getting popcorn to balance prettily on the top of each carriage was also beyond me, so that feature got the chop as well, as did the popcorn steam billowing out of the smoke stack (who can actually thread a pipe cleaner through a piece of popcorn without it breaking I ask you?)

But as I said, well past midnight and the cake, not quite looking like it had steamed straight out of the cook book’s glossy pages, was ready to put in the fridge.

It’s at this point I realised that checking your cake board (a giant foil covered baking tray) WOULD actually fit in your fridge before assembling the cake on top of it was probably pretty important.

Thankfully I was able to force the tray into the fridge, albeit on an angle the Little Engine That Could would have been proud to climb.

I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can ……

At least I thought I could.

Oh well, there was always his 6th birthday.