Three months ago I was a cash-rich, time-poor Londoner. I cooked toast in the mornings, if I wasn’t running late for work, but every other meal was eaten out or delivered to my front door.

But that was then and this is now: I have no income, I’m at home all day, and I have no excuse for not maintaining a degree of domestic order, at least for the next eight weeks while I’m waiting for the baby to arrive. And I really am trying. I peruse recipe books and shop for ingredients and attempt things that appear easy and nutritious (even though it takes me two and a half hours to make recipes that the Womens Weekly suggest you allow 40 minutes for, and by the time I’m finished standing at the kitchen counter for that long my back feels like a knife block, with the knives stuffed in).


But something’s going wrong.

I leave the oven on every single night without fail, and every morning H accuses me of trying to burn the house down and kill us all.

I’ve burnt the bottom of all the saucepans in the house.

I’ve burnt myself.

My cannelloni’s chewy, my spinach strudel tastes like wet grass, I destroy packet-mix muffins and I’m yet to make a dessert that hasn’t been a monumental disaster.

But none more so than what will be known, from this day forward, as the Great Cupcake Disaster of 2008.

My sister and I attended a cupcake masterclass this week. It was demonstration style rather than hands-on but our teacher made it all look and sound so bloody easy -- reiterating several times that the beauty of her recipes was that they were foolproof, you could open the oven as many times as you liked and it was impossible to ruin these invincible, unbreakable little cupcakes – that even I, the anti-Nigella, was convinced I could make them. And with the occasion of our cousin’s first birthday party this weekend, we thought we’d prepare a batch of chocolate cupcakes and turn up looking like domestic goddesses who’d effortlessly thrown together a batch of the latest in trendy cafe fare.



At 12 o’clock my sister arrived, laden with all the required ingredients and utensils, and we got cracking. The recipe allowed for 60 baby-sized cakes and was supposed to take roughly 13 minutes to bake. Fast-forward to 1:30 and we’re still stabbing the half-baked cakes with knives, willing them to cook faster and neater. Instead of rising into nice smooth mounds like our teacher’s did on the night, ours sat like little cat turds, darkening on the outside and remaining wet on the inside.

The party kicked off at 2pm and we didn’t want to be late as well as arrive with ugly cupcakes – so we finally agreed they were ready enough and we’d have to disguise the ugly surfaces with our pale blue cream cheese frosting.

So I began frosting. Except my frosting just looked like pale blue turds on top of dark brown turds. My sister (who, at 19, is actually a very capable cook and shouldn’t be taken down with me in this whole sorry event) took over while I extracted the offending ugly ones from the final cut. She piped a neat line of rosettes. Then we tried to draw little chocolate number 1s on top, using the ready-made fudge icing you can buy at Woolies. This was futile. Most of them looked like 2s, or random punctuation marks. We extracted those ones as well and switched to hundreds and thousands. By now we were down to 18 cakes (it was like reliving auditions week on Australian Idol). The grease on the outside of the cake wrappers was starting to leave oily marks on the plate, but it was too late to do anything about that.

My sister and H and I all tasted one of the rejects before we left, and agreed they weren’t brilliant but they would at least be appreciated by our almost-4-year-old cousin, K. I have to stress that cousin K is a huge fan of all things sugary and chocolatey and is pretty hard to displease when it comes to food.

“Cling wrap?” my sister suggested.
“No no,” I said. “We might ruin the icing.” And so we all dashed out to the car with the final contenders sliding around on an oily doily.

On the way I asked H if he could hold the plate while I applied my lipstick in the front seat. He held them out in front of him while we hurtled towards the freeway.

Then my sister made a sharpish turn, and in one of those slow-motion disaster scenes, half the cupcakes landed in H’s lap, icing side down, suctioned on to his jeans like snails. He picked them all off but they appeared to have imploded, with hunks of chocolate cake balanced on top of blue icing turds.


And so we arrived with 7 cupcakes salvaged from the train wreck.

Cousin K greeted us with a big smile as she eyed off the plate of cupcakes. But the final blow came when we served them and cousin K screwed up her face, earnestly informing the table that she wouldn’t be finishing hers because it tasted horrible.

We binned the remaining cupcakes to save the rest of the family from having to choke them down. When we got home we taste-tested a sample from the second batch (we took them out of the oven just as we were leaving for the party). My sister spat hers out, declaring that they tasted like tapioca chips. Why a four year old would reject a fist-sized ball of burnt oily flour I’ll never know. Foolproof my arse.

I know as a mum-to-be I have a number of years ahead of me where I’ll be expected to make cakes for birthday parties and cake stalls, and this terrifies me to the core. I am going to have to find a reliable cake supplier in the neighbourhood, and I will never again believe anyone who tells me a recipe is “so easy, it’s impossible to stuff up.” Pfff.

I liked it better in the good old days when we’d host afternoon tea at our flat in London and everyone would show up with a fruit tart or a banoffee pie from Marks and Spencer and we’d eat everything straight from the packet and feel very decadent indeed. None of us even knew how to switch our ovens on.

And when someone did attempt to bake and inevitably stuffed it up (like the Australia Day I made giant oily Anzac biscuits or the friend’s birthday when I created a mountain of greasy liquid “chocolate crackles”), it was seen as endearing and Bridget Jonesy (rather than just sad and incompetent), and everyone would get drunk and eat them anyway.

As if we girls don’t have enough pressures to contend with already. Thank you very much Nigella, you smug cow.