How not to make a birthday cake; a fail-safe recipe for domestic disaster

Ingredients: 

• My husband’s birthday
• A sudden desire to make him a surprise birthday cake
• One oven with a whole range of temperatures (note: the oven in our old flat had two; furnace and off. Not so great for baking, so I’m slightly out of practise *cough*)
• Two incoming back teeth, one small teethy toddler
• Assorted builders, scaffolders and plumbers at various points around our house.

Preparation:

• Decide to make a cake for your husband’s birthday
• Try not to get offended when you text your mum to tell her, and she replies saying ‘please just buy one from the shop’
• Go to the shop to buy baking supplies. Nearly forget supplies as buying decorations is much more fun.

Method:

1) Gather the ingredients together. Realise you are out of baking soda as you sprinkled it all on the carpets when you moved in (true story; it’s a tip I read on Mumsnet)

2) Try to weigh ingredients, realise the the battery in the weighing scales is dead as one small child has been repeatedly standing on them for fun. Wildly guess at amounts instead

3) Stop to make tea for the various workmen around the house

4) Go to blend ingredients, realise the blender was broken in the house move. Try and fail to locate the hand blender in the newly organised kitchen that you didn’t unpack

5) Text husband to ask him about location of hand blender, thus negating the surprise element of the cake

6) Stop to let the scaffolders walk through the kitchen, with a large amount of scaffolding

7) Attempt to mix everything together with the hand blender, which will result in one screaming child who really, really hates the noise. Add a large helping of bad mum guilt into the bowl

8) Stop to fill up a bucket of water for the builder

9) Resume activity momentarily. Be unable to put koala child down from hip, rendering hand blender difficult to use. Stir in some cries of ‘NOOOO mummy, Peppa’

10) Give up and go back to the shop for cake. Don’t text your mum to tell her this.