Oh FUDGE cake
This week, I have been winning at last-minute parenting.
The kids’ school had a Crazy Hair Day, which the kids were both very ambivalent about (autistic kids just don’t experience peer pressure—or community-building events—the same way as other kids). I encouraged them to ask their close friends about their plans for Crazy Hair day, which inspired Lizzie to do ‘something’.
I suggested I do 3 plaits in her hair, which I thought would pass muster both in terms of being ‘crazy’ and in terms of being so close to something familiar that it wouldn’t bother her. She accepted.
I felt vaguely guilty about not buying hair wax or colour stuff or something, but when some other parent posted frantically about their last-minute search for product I decided it was too late to do anything about it anyway.
So, Crazy Hair morning arrived, and I pulled open the plastic drawers where I dump all Lizzie’s unused hair stuff (she has basically sworn off all of it lately, including clips) and noticed the three hand-made ‘Wonder Woman’ bows that she bought off a friend’s stall last year mostly because she loves me and I like Wonder Woman. She’s literally never worn them.
I’d also been vaguely attempting to tidy recently (in preparation for maybe moving house) and found a ‘Wonder Woman’ Christmas decoration which I had shoved on a ‘deal with it later’ shelf. And I remembered the Wonder Woman necklace she bought me years ago, that I violently hate.
So: three plaits, three Wonder Woman bows. And the Christmas decoration hung off the biggest bow. And I put the necklace on her. And I found a pair of red clips, a pair of blue clips, and two pairs of sparkly blue clips. I put them all in and sent her off to school looking like we’d made an effort.
And she won ‘Best Crazy Hair’ in her year.
Crazy Hair: Yeah yeah!
I completely forgot to take any photos, so here’s a screenshot taken from a whole-class photo that is worse than useless.
Oh, and Lizzie wears glasses now. They look so good on her it’s incredible.
Moving on.
Today is Tim’s birthday party. Weeks ago I received his cake order (chocolate) and design (“Something to do with Minecraft or Pokemon”—”How about a poke ball?”—”Yeah!”)
The pokeball design was a stroke of genius on my part. I was pretty sure we had a round cake tin (we do) and I definitely knew that I could buy a pack of round, rolled-out fondant in white. Thus, all I had to do was slice the fondant circle in half, colour one half red, and roll that half back out into a semicircle. More or less.
I know fondant is actually disgusting (basically sugary plastic), so I bought a chocolate cake mix with plans to put chocolate icing on the cake, then the fondant on top.
And I remembered that cake takes ages to cook, so I set my alarm in order to make sure I got up in a timely manner.
I was smart, and double-greased the tin. The first layer makes the baking paper stick to the tin and the second makes the baking paper not stick to the cake. So when I had ten minutes to decorate the cake, I thanked my earlier-in the-day self because it popped out without the slightest hesitation or warping.
I warmed the icing a little as I mixed it, so it poured really easily too. The fondant was extremely easy to slice into a perfect semicircle, and although I may have sworn a little when I realised we had no red food colouring (only yellow or blue… or green if combined) I quickly pulled up a graphic with lots of different styles of poke balls and immediately spotted a yellow and white design.
Boom!
My hands are yellow from hand-mixing the lump of fondant with the yellow food colouring, and when I tried to roll it on a chopping board I soon discovered that fondant sticks to everything… except the plastic sheet that it comes in… so I re-rolled it on the sheet, sliced it into a perfect semicircle, and laid it on the cake.
I’d forgotten that there is some black in the classic poke ball design, but solved that problem by simply leaving a line of chocolate icing between the two semicircles of fondant (voila! Black line).
Then I sliced out a quick mini circle from the remaining white fondant, and sliced away a smaller circle out of the middle of that… and boom! The cake was done and looked pretty good!
Those lasagna dishes that come with a lid are great for transporting a cake (with dire warnings not to put the lid on during the drive as it was still hot from the oven) and I happened to have bought some assorted chocolate buttons with the party in mind, so I added them to the dish to make the rectangular shape a feature rather than a bug, and voila!
A 10-minute job that is definitely a Gold Poke Ball (Tim recognised the design with great excitement)!
Imagine what a moderately competent person could do with half an hour.
Felicity Banks 
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