Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes (11 page)

 “Tom, you’re so bloody practical – and selfish – and boring!” I screamed, storming back into the kitchen to arrange decorative limes on the granite worktop. He couldn’t see that this wasn’t just about Grace’s birthday party; it was about me wanting to do right by her after all the time I’d missed and about us doing something fun as a family. I was still racked by unworthy-mother guilt. I didn’t agree with Tom, Grace
did
need her Birthday luau, and I was going to make sure she got it – with or without her father's help.

I woke up the next day and decided to take matters into my own hands.

Grace was going to a friend’s house after school (and would no doubt be painting her lips and nails black whilst planning her first tattoo) so I took the bull by the horns and approached a small local hotel regarding her party. They came up with what I considered to be a very reasonable Mount Etna-style buffet for thirty children in a Honolulu-style setting for £250. I booked the venue there and then but nearly fainted at the price of creating a spectacular volcano cake. They wanted a further £175 so I promised to ‘talk it over with my husband’ and left.

As I arrived home, clutching my receipt for the venue, I felt slightly nauseous. I knew I was still working on the Oprah-esque ‘take charge of your own destiny’ thing but I couldn’t stop myself worrying about what Tom would say and dreading another eruption over grass skirts and cake volcanoes.

Walking into the sitting room, I saw that Tom was home from work and hard at it, about to bat against Pakistan. I watched him twitching in the chair, knowing I needed to get him off the pitch and convince him that Grace’s party was absolutely vital for all our emotional well-being. He also needed to get it into his thick skull that Hawaii was not a theme to be taken lightly; we were talking tropical fruit-filled paradise in the bowels of Bromsgrove, and believe me that didn’t come cheap.

“Hi,” I ventured, sitting on the sofa nearby and trying vainly to attract his attention.

“Christ, they’re giving us a run for their money!” he announced, to no one in particular.

“Talking of money,” I saw the opening and raised my voice, “I’ve just booked a hotel, for Grace’s birthday. It was only £250 which I think was quite reasonable,” I gabbled and biting the bullet added, “plus another £175 for the cake.”

His initial response, in between runs, overs and wickets, was silence.

“I said, I have just paid for...” I started again.

“I heard what you said,” he snapped. “I just don’t believe it, Stella.”

I felt the tremor underfoot – this was going to blow, so I stomped out of the sitting room and into the kitchen. On safer ground, no leather on willow here, I switched on my nice, comforting kettle but to my surprise, Tom appeared in the doorway. For him to abandon England to carry on without him during a vital cricket match was unprecedented, and for just a moment – a teeny tiny one – I realised the enormity of what I’d done.

“Have you any idea how much money we have?” he said. Then without waiting for an answer, he continued, “We have almost nothing Stella! We’ve had a couple of expensive years and now, without your salary, there will be nothing left in the bank at the end of the month. Do you understand? NOTHING!”

Even in this awful moment I was amazed at how animated this made him and couldn’t help but think it would be nice to see this kind of passion in other areas of our life.

“You have no income Stella – what if you were on your own?” he continued, more calmly, like he was about to die or something.
God
, I thought,
he’s been coughing a bit recently, I hope he’s OK
.

“You and Grace are a huge responsibility and it worries me.”

This was the perfect opening to make him see my point. “Tom, I told you it’s what Grace wants, and I feel...”

He slowly walked towards me, his hands held out in despair.

“You feel? Always about you, isn’t it, Stella? What about how I feel? About how I lie awake at night worrying about the mortgage, bills, car tax, all those boring things that don’t interest you? Go on Stella, tell me, what do we do now? You’re the one who tossed her job down the drain and instead of trying to find something else, you’ve immediately spent several hundred pounds we don’t have.” This was becoming ever so slightly scary because Tom always knew what to do. For him to ask my advice on monthly finance issues was bizarre and unsettling. “You must have a plan,” he continued, “because I sure as hell don’t!”

 “If you have a problem with a birthday cake shaped like a volcano and costing £175 then perhaps you shouldn't have had a child!” I shrieked, slamming plates into the dishwasher like something from a Greek wedding. Tom just stared at me and walked back into the living room.

After a few minutes I popped my head discreetly round the door to see if he was still alive. I watched him slowly turn off the TV (this was serious, he
never
turned the TV off), pick up his jacket and walk out of the door. I was shocked and hurt – how dare he just walk out like that! So I ran to the front door and hurled a couple of decorative limes at his car as it screeched off. I got the last word of course, it was something eloquent and highbrow, along the lines of, “Yes, you can just piss off, you tight bastard!” But by then, he’d gone.

As I walked slowly back into the kitchen, I wondered what was happening to us. I’d made huge sacrifices already and stopped buying ready-meals from M&S. I had cancelled my order for
wild
salmon from the Orkneys and
organic
pork by post from Nigella’s preferred butcher. Yes, I was slumming it now; I’d put my money where my mouth was and was making ends meet but did Tom give me any credit? Did he hell.

At midnight Tom still wasn’t back and I was starting to get worried. Perhaps if I lost a stone he'd fall in love with me all over again and things would be like they used to. Dieting would definitely start the next day. Lizzie had also lent me the new Paul McKenna book and CD: “Babes, you can just lie there and it will happen,” she assured me and I have to admit, Paul looked very serious and somewhat tantalising with promises of ‘I Can Make You Thin,’ so it must work. Yes, I’d get rid of this blubber by simply lying back and letting Paul McKenna have his hypnotic way with me again and again until I was an eight-stone supermodel.

Tom finally came in at about 2am. I felt it was perhaps time for me to compromise, so in the light of all the recent Hawaiian themed dramas, I conceded.

“Tom,” I announced. “I am sorry I haven’t been a bit more understanding about money. I will make the Princess's volcano-shaped birthday cake myself and save us £175. It won’t be as good as a professional cake and I’m not completely happy about it, but I do want to help.”

“Yeah...whatever,” Tom sighed in monotone, accepting my sacrifice with a nod but without the gushing gratefulness I'd hoped for. As he climbed into our kingsize bed (with dove-grey over-quilt that matched the John Lewis curtains perfectly), I gave him a warm smile and took his hand. But Tom just switched off the light and turned away from me.

 It made me feel so sad, the way everything was turning out. Grace was a Goth, Tom was miserable and I couldn’t talk to Mum about it all because she had gone away with friends she met on eBay (she posted herself on there, thinking it was a social-networking site – and for Mum it became one).

 “Are you OK?” I asked Tom in a wobbly voice.

“Yeah, I’ll be OK. We just have stuff to sort out,” came the reply from the darkness.

 “I was worried when you left,” I said. “I shouldn’t complain about having no money, I’m here at home as I wanted, a Fifties housewife and organic meatball-making mother.” I joked half-heartedly, realising that instead of being a fulfilled wife baking flapjacks in a flowery apron as I’d dreamed, I felt completely worthless.

Closing my eyes, I comforted myself with the thought that I was the same age as the Desperate Housewives – and they were having a ball. Teri Hatcher reinvented herself and came back for a second bite at that big, juicy old cherry; in fact she was rubbing cherry juice all over that forty-something body of hers – and the boys
and
her bank balance were loving it. I told myself I wouldn’t give up my dreams, but as Tom’s snoring pierced my bubble, I realised that without a Hollywood makeup artist, dentist, plastic surgeon and a lifetime’s supply of Botox I would have to try a slightly different road to Teri and her neighbours on Wisteria Lane.

The next morning I decided it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself: I had a volcano cake to plan and only three days to make it. I rang Al; he always loved a drama and I needed to share a little panic-time before I embarked on the volcano.

“Al, I am about to create an artwork in confectionery and I need cocoa beans from Argentina, vanilla from Madagascar, butter from Normandy and raw cane sugar from the Caribbean,” I announced.

He didn’t let me down. “Oh My God doll! What you need is Candace Nelson on speed dial!”

“Who?”

“
The
Candace – of Sprinkles Bakery? Beverly Hills? Do keep up my love.”

“Well, I’ll have to make do with Tesco,” I sighed. “I’m just not sure about quantities and stuff.”

“Well, just think big. If the recipe says one kilo of sugar, buy two.”

“Recipe? Gosh I don’t always follow a recipe for cake – I just throw it all in from memory then add flavours I fancy.” I said, concerned.

“Sweetie, you need to be focused. Do you think Candace created Sprinkles’ dark chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting and bittersweet chocolate ganache by ‘throwing it all in’?”

“Probably – I mean that’s how you discover new flavours and...”

“Doll, I’m off work tomorrow. You obviously need help, so I’ll come over and advise,” he said.

I was beginning to regret calling Al. There was such a lot to think about and Al flouncing round the kitchen in an ‘advisory’ capacity playing, ‘Candace of Beverly Hills’ didn’t sound like help to me. Anyway, I drained the last of my coffee, got in the car and headed out for the supermarket. On arrival I grabbed a very large trolley and zig-zagged it to the Home Baking aisle.

Loading the trolley with flour and sugar I couldn’t resist hurling in lots of vibrant crunchy hundreds and thousands and tubs of silver tooth-breaking balls. I fell in love with some little sugar pigs and also couldn’t resist a long tube of delicate lemon and white icing flowers. However, despite my deep joy at discovering these little cake decorating treasures it was clear there wasn’t anything that said ‘cake volcano.’

I was just loading twenty packs of unsalted butter into the trolley when I heard “Stella, is that you, with 200 kilos of fat?” Al had warned me about the ‘food police’ that supermarkets were now employing; I knew I should have shopped online. I turned round expecting to see some sort of police/Tesco uniform but was equally horrified to see athletic ‘Jemma with a J’, my Lighter Lift counsellor, swinging her way down the aisle. She’d lost seven pounds once by taking off her cardi and cutting out biscuits for a week so felt it gave her the right to be superior and talk down to anyone over nine stone. “You should be enjoying a good brisk walk and a chilled glass of Perfect Peach,” she said, wagging her finger.

I smiled sheepishly; “Jemma, hi. I’m, er, making a birthday cake for my daughter’s party,” I offered, feeling like a school kid caught skiving by the headmistress.

“I hope you’re not going to eat it,” she said, smug in her size-ten jeans and tight little top.

“Lovely to see you, got to go,” I said, grimacing and hauling the trolley in the opposite direction. It was resisting strongly under the weight of ingredients and its insistence on veering to the left was almost dislocating my hip. In my desperation to escape I yanked it forward, staggering past ‘Continental Cheeses’ in agony but with a determined gait, refusing to let her witness my pain.

Driving home with five million calories-worth of cargo I thought
a
woman is never free from guilt. If it wasn’t my work or family I am letting down it is my own body. How could skinny Jemma think it was OK to jog up to me in Tesco like a bloody Olympic runner and tell me what I should be putting in my mouth?

Heaving the gargantuan butter, flour and sugar mountain from the car to the house, I reckoned I must have worked off at least three slices of carrot cake. So I duly refilled as soon as I got in. Telling myself it was filled with carrots and therefore healthy, I opened up my favourite cookery books and devoured cake-porn over hot coffee and moist, spicy sponge.

I found a recipe for a large square cake but my biggest problem was that I didn’t have a cake tin large enough. I did have two smaller ones and after much thought (and more carrot cake) I decided I would simply have to make four squares and join them together under a huge blanket of sugarpaste. This would form the base for the mountain but I still had to make the volcano itself. I hunted out a pen and paper and made a few quick sketches then decided that the easiest way to do this would be to make three light, round sponges and stack them on top of each other. I would join them with delicious buttercream, then shave and shape the edges with a sharp knife and cut a crater in the top layer. Once this was placed in the centre of the base, I could use textured icing to create a mountain effect on the outside of the cake and use marbled yellow and orange icing inside the crater itself.

First I weighed the flour, sieving it high to add air for the lightest sponge possible. I then sieved cinnamon onto the top of the huge flour mound in the bowl, creating snow-capped mountains in negative, the snow beneath and the earth dusting the top. Pineapple juice and brown sugar sweetened the mix as whole eggs landed hard into flour and softened butter thudded onto mountainous, sugary terrain. I used to watch Mum bake like this, anticipating the reward of a loaded wooden-spoon to be licked clean of creamy, sweet batter. I wished Mum was with me, I wished we had more time together and like a child I rewarded myself with a curative lick at the spoon. The cool, sweet, creamy mouthful filled me with warmth, obliterating the guilt and grown-up doubts with a poultice of brown sugar and butter.

Laying greaseproof paper into the square tins and pressing it into the corners I thought of Tom and me – were we the snug, perfect fit I’d always thought we were? I’d blamed working life for the obstacles in our relationship, but perhaps we weren’t as happy as I’d thought after all. I dropped the gloopy mixture into the tins and opened the oven which blasted me with a waft of boiling air, almost taking my breath away. As I closed the door on the mixture and watched it slowly level I realised that I couldn’t blame work anymore for our failings as a couple. Unlike the cake batter, my marriage wouldn’t just settle on its own. It needed help. Tom and I had nothing left to hide behind anymore and I knew I had to do more than just spectate.

45 minutes later, the first two squares of fruit-scented, golden sponge emerged and suddenly things didn’t look too bad. I tipped them onto wire cooling racks and started the second batch; the warm, sweet air went to my head and I found myself giggling insanely at nothing. Eventually I took out the second batch of steaming cake and tearing myself away I set off to collect Grace from school. Waiting with the other mums I smiled and opened my arms as she and the rest of her class burst out into the playground.

“Mum!” she squealed, with barely-concealed horror; “What are you wearing?” I looked down to see I was still wearing my cinnamon-dusted floury apron and furry slippers. We both giggled, her embarrassment tempered by the fact that I was so ‘uncool’ it was hilarious. I hugged her and threatened more outrageous outfits for future school collections as she covered her face in mock horror. Holding hands, we rushed home together. I couldn’t wait to get back and start working on the plans for the decoration and the icing flavours.

Once home, I made the three sponges for the volcano and we slapped them with buttercream and joined them together. I then began carefully shaving sections off, to create the volcano shape.

“I think the top is too big,” said Grace after some consideration. “And I think we need to slice more bits off to make it smaller...and then eat those bits,” she smiled, raising her eyebrows hopefully.” I agreed that we should neaten the top up and scoop out some cake to make the crater. Grace was enthusiastically testing the shavings when Tom arrived home. .

“Dad, Dad...I know what I want to be when I grow up,” she announced, running to him and spraying a mouthful of sponge crumbs into the air, “I’m going to be a cake taster.”

Tom picked her up and whizzed her round. “That cake smells good Stella,” he said, smiling and winking at me.
Click
, I thought; this was the snapshot I’d longed for – my family home together, an effortless and happy scene.

As threatened, Al came in an ‘advisory capacity,’ the following day. He had lots to contribute and was still in the kitchen washing up two days later.

“I feel permanently sticky,” I announced over the volcano.

“Yes doll, I can see that and I hate to say it but the sweating is more Gordon Ramsay than Nigella Lawson.”

I giggled.

“But at least you seem to being enjoying yourself,” he observed, with a smile.

He was right; it was fun. My absolute favourite bit had been deciding on the marriage of flavours and textures for decorating the cake.

“I’m thinking coconut and pineapple with a little lacing of vanilla?” I suggested to Al.

“Mmm, I think the vanilla may be one ingredient too much, doll,” he said. “Let’s keep the vomiting children down to a minimum and stick with the basic piňa colada flavours with a hint of cinnamon spice.”

Once we’d applied the sugar-blanket coating, our four joined-up cakes were like a huge blank canvas on which we could paint anything we wanted. We then carefully placed the three, now almost conical, joined sponges in the middle. I held my breath as I was worried they might be too heavy and that the base would sink but to my relief they were fine. Then I got to work slapping thick chocolate buttercream around the sides of the volcano. Grace joined in excitedly and watched Al, who was finally utilising his degree in Graphic Design and working on the intricate, arty stuff.

“At the base of this magnificent, pineapple beast we will carefully place twenty-five grass-skirted sugar figurines dancing on white chocolate sand frosting,” Al said in a regal voice, much to Grace’s delight.

These sugar-crafted beauties dipped tiny toes into azure seas (blue food colouring with white frosty tips). The rolling waves were framed by sugar palm trees so real you could almost hear them swishing in the breeze. Behind them, the mountain rose majestically and near the top we positioned a Hawaiian flag, stuck to a cocktail stick. The crater of the volcano smouldered in marbled yellow and orange and little flowers were dotted around the mountainside.

Al had even added a perfect, tiny pair of sparkly flip-flops made from marzipan. “They are yours, Grace,” he said, positioning them on the beach. “I think you’ve just gone for a swim.”

 It was the middle of the night when we finally completed it and Al and I just sat drinking tea and staring at the amazing spectacle we’d created. “Not bad for two old telly tarts,” he smiled, wiping a tear from his eye. We hadn’t slept for two days and he was tired and emotional.

When we finally unveiled the completed Mount Etna-by-the-sea (not geographically correct I’ll admit), Grace shrieked with delight. Even Lizzie, who had come to the house pre-party to help screamed in amazement and Tom had to pop his head round the door to see what all the noise was about.

“Wow, that is really good,” he said, genuinely surprised. At that moment I could have cried (Al did). After all the stuff I’d ever done in life, this cake felt like the high point of my achievements. As she danced round the kitchen I could see it made my daughter very happy too.

If I had ever had any doubts about fighting Tom for this party they were completely washed away by the look on Grace’s face as she entered the room we’d decorated in Hawaiian beach party-style. ‘Happy Birthday Grace’ was plastered all over the walls, with huge vibrantly-coloured paper flowers dotted everywhere and huge blow-up palm trees in every corner.

 “I am soooo excited!” she squealed, unable to contain the bubbling hysteria in her voice.

The party started at three and as her friends arrived, Grace greeted them at the door accepting beribboned gifts and cards and placing them on a trestle table to be opened in a frenzy of happiness later. “Mummy this is just amazing,” she said with shiny eyes as she grappled with an armful of gifts.

As soon as all the guests had arrived the disco started and several of the more confident dancers started wiggling their tiny hips with little regard to the musical rhythm. I watched from the sidelines with amusement as Tom secured the piñata and everyone queued up politely, just like at school. Given a pole and faced with an inanimate object packed with sugary treats, however, even the shyest children transformed instantly into savages. I exchanged smiles with Tom who ducked the pole as a tiny, red-haired girl whacked the poor piñata with such force that her feet lifted off the ground. It didn’t stand a chance and spewed out tubes and packets of sweets to the delight of the little girls who roared like beasts and wrestled each other to the ground. “They’re fighting to the death for a packet of Parma Violets,” Tom laughed.

After the piñata abuse, the food was served and the children ate ice cream and fruit cocktails like they’d been on a fast. Grace’s grass skirt soon became sticky with icing and spilt fruit juice but she was oblivious, happily dancing and laughing.

“She’s having a wonderful time isn’t she,” I said to Tom, who was smiling at his daughter playing the clown.

He looked at me and smiled, not ready to admit I was right, at which point Al came over. He had embraced the occasion with a tinsel Lei over a Hawaiian shirt. He was followed by Lizzie, who’d gone for a slightly more ‘out there,’ grass skirt with a T-shirt stating, ‘I need a good Lei,’ emblazoned across her ample bosom.