Let them eat….something else.

They’re all sitting here, mocking me with their silence. Staring judgementally at me through the eyes that I gave them.

No, not my children…. Their cakes.

To set the tone, I’m sitting here being stared down by the Little Mermaid and her Princess posse, books and DVD cases stacked to table height beside me, in a quest to sculpt them to perfection out of icing.  My toe is mechanically bouncing Miss Moo’s rocker and even she is looking up at me under a light dusting of Icing Sugar and urging me to give up.

Miss Boo is occasionally poking her ringleted head into the dining room and quipping that ‘Cinderella can’t get dressed without GusGus the mouse and her shoe needs to be on a pillow’.

And, scene.

Let us start at the very beginning though, in the lead up story that preludes this image.

It was always an inevitable fact that when talking to me the subject would eventually veer into cake territory. I am, in many circles, Dee: Cake Lady.

There are a million and one reasons why I’ve chosen a life of cake batter, but the only reason I persevere with it is because in the eyes of my girls, it paints me as a genius.

For the lucky ones amongst us who have clicked over into adulthood and discovered a new found respect for their mothers, it becomes a subconscious urge to try and make our children proud of us also.

I look at my mother now in complete wonderment and admiration. She is not only supermum, she maintained a career, friendships and a marriage and for that alone her image to me is that of an outstanding mother and an outstanding woman.

With that inspiration, my goal in life is to now be ‘that woman’. The woman who my girls will one day look at and not only be nurtured by, but be proud of. 

No pressure or anything.

It is with those same notes of virtue that I strive to set examples for them rather than goals. Of course, Miss Boo’s insistence that she will get what she wants and do so on her own falls under that umbrella of training. I have no one else to blame other than myself when I’m watching her scale the kitchen cabinets proclaiming that she will be cooking her own lunch. “I can do it all by my own!” she calls to me in a familiar voice that is like the ghost of my kitchens past.

(Mum, I now finally understand what you mean when you tell people I was born 30 and I deeply, deeply apologise.)

In a way, I want the girls to see me burn things as much as I want them to see me create them. I want them to see that the process and method doesn’t always go to plan but that the ultimate goal is the happiness that surrounds a moment, not the material that creates it.

Cue the appeal of cakes.

Firstly, it’s cake so win win.

Secondly, have you ever flipped through your lifetime of photos and noticed that all the big events, your birthdays, graduations, wedding etc, are all images of you posing with loved ones around the sugary goodness of a cake?

It’s the centre piece that stops a party and forces us to all focus on its reason. In that moment, an event pauses, it’s guests start singing in celebration, and everyone’s voice unifies into one giant hum of happiness. 

It really doesn’t matter how good or bad a cake is (I know because I chant this as a mantra when things go lopsided). It just matters that you have it there to bring you together for that instant.

So, with that passion for cakes and the thirst for my girls pride, I have become Dee:Cake Lady.

To be brutally honest, I’m not in any way shape or form a ‘professional’. I watch one episode of Cake Boss, fill myself with imagery confidence and then cry when I can’t make 3kgs of icing defy gravity.

But, that’s OK. I can just mix another batch and start again. It’s another few hours of standing in a messy kitchen with Miss Boo perched on the bench licking more batter than she’s stirring. 

And it is within that disastrous moment right there, before the cake even becomes the cake, that Miss Boo looks up at me and says ‘it’s OK Mummy, you can fix it’, and bless her apron, she believes it.

When she looks at a Princess castle with 30 spires and spiral staircases, she has no hesitation to look at me and nod towards it as if to say ‘I can see that with some candles on top’.

She quite literally believes that I am the Michelangelo of cake construction.

With that level of belief and encouragement driving you, what mother wouldn’t smile and reply ‘and what flavour would you like that in?’

Which naturally brings us to our opening image of semi-defeated me, sitting wilted and yawning at a table covered with powder.

I don’t know where this cake will take me. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to watch another Disney movie without throwing something at the screen. I do know that Miss Boo will more than likely have very little, if any, memory of it.

However, I also know that when someone casually asks her when she’s twenty-something what her 3^rd birthday cake looked like, she will smile and say with confidence ‘I can’t remember… but I’m sure it was fabulous.’