The baking panic

As part of my initiation into my new working life, I have become part of the ‘cake club’. This does exactly what you’d expect…bakes. Weekly. Each week a new member of the team is called upon to flex their gastromonical muscles and create a feast for the (now 28 strong) team. So not a small cake you understand. Fairy cakes need not apply, we’re talking size matters.

Cooking isn’t really my thing. That’s a real understatement, qualified by the simple fact that I haven’t done a ‘weekly shop’ (i.e planned what I intend to cook for more than one night), since I split up with Andy in 2002. I live for the moment, I’m a ready meal queen. I buy for that evening and that evening only. I eat out roughly 4 nights per week- cheap places mind. When I do cook it’s reluctantly, and it’s for other people (well Steve) and it’s usually not particularly good. In fact it always ends up tasting the same whether pudding, starter or main…pretty depressing eh? So it’s no wonder that the prospect of cooking for all those new people, (colleagues no less) was a little bit frightening. And having them all pass judgement…

‘I thought Ali was ok until I tasted that god-awful bloody creation of hers’

You get the picture. This is worse than a driving test.

But what’s that? Light at the end of the tunnel?

Yes, light in the form of my friend Sam. Thank god I have the best friends in the world, and one of the one’s who’s helped me out more than I could possibly ask for in recent months is the very lovely Sam.

I penned a panicky email to her, something along the lines of

‘eeek, I have to cook. What am I going to do? How am I going to get the cake from Brighton, I can’t cook at Steve’s he doesn’t have the tins and scales and ‘gear’ required, plus I actually can’t cook and have never baked a cake, ever’

And she responded with this: (or something along these lines)

‘don’t worry, come and cook and mine, I know exactly which cake you can make, I can oversee the making and we can drink wine and bake merrily.’

I love her. And I love her even more for offering to get the ingredients for me on her weekly shop (yes, she’s the type who does one, so this comes naturally to her).

So tonight we bake. There’s going to be cream, there’s going to be eggs and flour, music, probably a little bit of kitchen dancing, there won’t be any tears or panic because when Sam’s around even if someone’s head falls off, it’s no biggy, it’s fine. She just deals with everything…the stoical queen of Bow.

I’ll let you know how it goes down, and hopefully doesn’t come back up again.