Let’s do this together

Putting the pancake into cake this week, The Dark Lord has been up to her usual baking tricks in the kitchen when half-term downpours meant it was too wet for skateboarding.

There’s a big row going on about imperial or metric measures at the moment, but it’s very difficult to deal with someone who doesn’t in fact measure anything.

However, the delicious smell of baking found its way to me upstairs in the office, so I went to find out when her yummy creation would be ready. Looking in the oven, I asked: “Where is it?” She nonchalantly said: “Oh I made it smaller this time.”

But I couldn’t see anything in the baking tins. “How small?” I asked.

“Oh I dunno – this small,” she sighed at my stupidity, and took the cake tins out of the oven with the gloves.

“It’s not small – it’s not risen. Did you actually use self-raising flour in the cake mix?” I asked.

“I dunno, I just poured it in and added baking soda,” she said as she shrugged and tipped the thin halves of cakes out to cool on the wire tray.

“Not baking soda – baking POWDER, you twerp. The clue’s in the name on the tins – one says for batters and the other one for fluffy muffins and cakes. See?” I said, pointing it out.

Then I looked at the bowl where she had made the buttercream and said: “But it’s full of lumps of icing sugar.”

“Yes I know – it’s my special recipe,” she giggled. So I took a spoon and pushed it through a sieve to smooth it out. “There, that didn’t take long, did it?” I said, arching one eyebrow.

The Dark Lord put her cake together with the buttercream and raspberry jam and it still looked as flat as a pancake.

The Dark Lord’s skateboarder friend, Kai, was with her in the kitchen, and he tried a slice of the bizarre-looking thing. “It’s erm… crispy and tastes of butter,” he said, laughing.

“Which is not really what you want from a sponge cake. There’ll be no Paul Hollywood handshake for you,” I told The Dark Lord. “I hope they teach you to read recipes when you’re back in food tech next week.”

However, my daft teenager is not the only one to have failed to get her mix right. Reader Wendy Maddox from Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, writes: “Food tech was called cookery classes when I was at school in the 1960s. My mum was a confectioner and I learned a lot from her, but my downfall was when I was in cookery class in senior school and we had to make pastry.

“I was that busy talking, I put too much water in my mix and it was like ‘slop’. Oh dear, did I get a telling off from the teacher.”

■ Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

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Yours, Siobhan