Dave's Birthday

I am not a neat cook. It pains me to say it but I cannot make my dishes look beautiful. Tasty maybe, but never beautiful. I've learnt to live with the fact that when my chicken and asparagus pie comes out the oven, it won't look anywhere near like the one my mum bought for us from Tesco's when we were younger, with the even golden pastry and the neat dimpled pattern round the edge. I can guarantee it will taste better, but the golden sheen on top will be uneven where I've splashed on the egg wash in a rush, some of the filling will be oozing out the side where I couldn't stretch the pastry quite far enough.

One particular area that I struggle with is cakes. Whenever I bake a cake, I always have visions in my head of how it's going to turn out. I think it'll come out just like it does on the shop. Every time I say to myself, 'this time, this time, it's going to look like it belongs in a book'.  But it usually ends up looking like a Victoria sponge with a bit of spew on top.

It was Dave's birthday and in honour of his favourite book, Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick', I decided to make a cake with a whale on it. I imagined a beautifully iced cake in dark blue, using lighter blue icing for the wave detailing, and a perfectly modelled, lifelike whale spouting water from his blowhole. I know, it sounds really dodge but it looked lush in my head. Getting home and realising that I had neither blue food colouring, nor the the right icing sugar, was not a good start. What I ended up with was this:

Horrif.  At least my picnic lunch of homemade sausage rolls, scotch eggs (with the soft yolk in the middle, yum), ham sandwiches, pitta chips and hummus in Regents Park made up for it. Preceded by the zoo, and followed by cocktails at Academy. Then we got home and ate the cake, and it was bloody delicious.

Dave doesn't actually look that impressed...