Birthday cakes

I don’t know if you have this too, but in our calendar year we have clusters of birthdays. They’re not nicely evened out over the year.

No, they’re bunched together like squabbling ducks in two hefty and expensive waddles, June/July and October/November.

There’s not a problem with that, of course. It’s lovely to have friends to celebrate birthdays with.

But it does mean that I’m baking birthday cakes quite a lot at this time of the year.

This is the latest one, a chocolate and hazelnut creation that will soon be bouncing down the bumpy croft track on its way to a friend a few miles away.

I gave up all hope of finding my piping bag which is still buried somewhere in the boxes, and bought a cheap set of piping nozzles online. We have swirls again.

It was only last week that a lemon and elderflower one made a very similar journey, and the week before that another one.

It’s not the baking of them that’s the challenge, although to be honest I’m not a great baker of cakes, and even worse at decorating them. It’s the transportation of them over these awful roads full of potholes, blind bends and precipitous gradients.

I normally ask Hugh to drive whilst I sit there in the passenger seat clutching the cake, sometimes in a tin, sometimes on a plate, depending on how fragile it seems. I act as a sort of secondary suspension, balancing and re-levelling it dynamically as best as I can as we bounce along avoiding cars and potholes.

I’ve only lost one, to be honest. And that was my fault. I tripped over the doorstep as I left the house and watched my strawberry crème patisserie creation arc gracefully into the evening air and crash land upside down on the gravel.

Before I even got to the car.