Hippy Hoppy Birdy
I’m not going to pretend now it’s my mother baking this cake because I don’t think she ever did, that I can remember because she was an artist, she was a singer and she never learned to cook in case someone made her do it. She used to sing - The Silver Swan, often, which is an Elizabethan madrigal about the swan that only sings when it’s dying. And Must I if I have an apple never more desire a peach? She used to sing that one in late summer when the first apples ripened and we’d have them at supper with the pips still whitish and the flesh a bit sour and hard. She’d sing, Must I if I have an apple, never more desire a peach? ruefully so you could tell, in a way, almost, though she didn’t say it, that she’d had peaches in her time and this hard green slightly scabby apple was better than nothing but not that much better. So it’s me baking this cake because You do it so much better than I do, darling!
The first thing I do is get the stuff out of the fridge which is very ancient. Our Aunt Mary gave it to us, it must have been one of the first fridges in Manchester and when it was old Aunt Mary got a new one and gave the old one to us. It was so old that they couldn’t yet have invented proper insulation because the door and the walls were six inches thick at least and the handle opened with a great heavy lever, the sort you only see these days on industrial walk-in freezers, and you pulled it down with a kind of hiss and squeak and shut it with a great clunk like the door of a really expensive car. So I get the butter (no, it will be marge, this is only just after the war, I wouldn’t use butter for baking would I?) and the milk out of the fridge and the door clunks shut. The ice-bit at the top is all white encrusted, I don’t think Aunt Mary had told us about defrosting the fridge. I think we just looked at the ice building up and thought it was the way things were, God’s will, the ice just goes on getting thicker around the heart.
So I go to the cupboard and get out sugar, flour, cocoa powder. And I go out to the larder and get two eggs from the waterglass crock, last summer’s eggs, right at the bottom of the crock so you have to plunge your hand into the slime at the bottom and pull out two and rinse them under the tap. Then I crack the first shell against the side of a cup and the inside slurps out. The yolk breaks because this is not
a fresh egg but I sniff it gingerly and it’s OK so I tip it into a bowl and break the next one and that’s OK too. You have to break them into a cup first because if you don’t you can find yourself with your whole bowlful of egg ruined if the last one is off. You don’t often meet an off egg these days, it’s a terrible smell. And the egg goes all black and green.
Everything is laid out on the table now and I switch on the oven. I cut the marge into small pieces in a bowl. I put cocoa powder in a cup and add some hot milk and mix it round until it’s smooth. I weigh out sugar and flour, I sift the flour into another bowl. There are a lot of bowls around, there will be a lot of washing up. I beat the sugar and marge together with a wooden spoon because this is before electric beaters, this is the time when you have to bash away until your marge and sugar goes pale and creamy and that may take some time. Bang bang against the sides of the bowl with the spoon and then, after ten minutes or so, shuffle shuffle, slurp slurp. Now I whisk up the eggs with my balloon whisk and add them, a bit at a time so they don’t curdle. And the vanilla. I have to climb up to the top shelf of the cupboard where the vanilla lives with all the other bottles - strawberry, cochineal, green food colouring, sherry flavouring, almond - in an old biscuit tin and the lid has rusted on because I haven’t been at home and Mother doesn’t make cakes so I have to prise the lid off with a knife and it scrapes on the enamel and leaves a bright place where the metal shows through. There’s not much vanilla left.
I sift the flour over the creamed mixture and fold it in. Fold in gently says the recipe book that I don’t have to look up any more but when I do the action I think of the words: fold and gently and they sound comforting and I like to think that’s what I’m doing, folding in gently and I think what a mistake this has been, this way I watch myself doing something and fit the words to my action and enjoy the words and almost don’t notice the action, I think now, folding gently. Now I add the cocoa mixture, sliding the spatula round the bottom of the bowl to get all the mix out. Cocoa is expensive. And I mix and mix, fold and fold the dark glossy chocolate into the pale creamy cake mix until it’s all a light subtle brown.
I grease two flat round tins with the paper from the margarine. Then I trace two circles on margarine papers with a pencil and cut them out and put one on the base of each tin so the cake doesn’t stick. I hold the bowl to my chest and slurp the mix out with the spatula. I smooth the top and slide the tin into the oven, shut the door and kick it with my heel because there’s something wrong with the latch. Twenty-five minutes. Plenty of time to do the washing up.
They come out fine, well-risen, spongy to the touch, flat on top. I run a knife round the sides of the tins, turn them out on a cooling-rack and peel the paper off the bottoms. While they cool I mix the butter-icing to sandwich them together, keeping some aside for the piping. Icing sugar and cocoa and boiling water for the icing. When the cakes are cold I spread the butter-icing on one and fit the other on top of it. I spread the glace-icing on the top layer and leave it to cool. Now I take my icing syringe and fill it with butter icing and pipe rosettes round the edge. The very last thing 1 do is write HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING in pale creamy writing across the smooth dark chocolate It looks so good. It looks as if I’ve taken a lot of trouble, it looks as if I know how to make a proper birthday cake and I do.
So now I find an old biscuit-tin and I wrap the cake up in greaseproof paper and slide it into the tin. I fill in the spaces at the corners with scrunched-up newspaper so the cake doesn’t shift about in the tin. I take a sheet of brown paper from the cupboard where we keep the old wrapping paper and find some string we have saved from old parcels and I wrap the tin in the paper and tie it with the string. I write the address and put THIS WAY UP WITH CARE in thick red pencil. I take it to the Post Office.
When it arrives at school it’s my birthday, I have four birthday cards (one with a postal order from Mother) and the cake. I undo the string, unwrap the paper, take the cake out of the tin and take off the greaseproof and it’s almost perfect. Just a few of the rosettes are smudged.
Everyone says, Can I have a bit, can I have a bit? I say, Yes yes wait a minute.
Jane says, Did your Mummy make it for you?
I say, Yes.
Katy says, The writing’s a bit wobbly.
I say, Well my Mummy isn’t a cook really, she’s a singer. And I sing, Must ah if ah hev en ah-pul nevah moah desiah ah pich?, getting those professional vowels exactly right.
Katy says, What’s that supposed to mean?
Page(s) 44-46
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