Remembrance of the Dalek
Inspired by my recent purchase of a Dalek cookie kit (as yet unmade), here's a real blast from the past.
It's a pair of birthday cakes, as cunningly made by my artistically-minded mum. Judging by the number of candles on each cake, the year must have been 1977, when my brother was 4 and I was 6 (his birthday is the day before mine, hence the joint celebration). In any case, it's plain to see that my interests have changed very little over the last thirty years...
The Dalek was my brother's cake: personally, I was extremely scared by Daleks back in those days, although not when in cake form (I was a wuss, but not THAT much of a wuss). I think the inside was made of various pieces of plain sponge, cunningly stuck together with jam and covered with blue icing, and it had candles in candleholders for the eye-stalk and blasters, and coloured Smarties for the round knobby bits down the side. The extra candle sticking out of the top of its head is not really canon, but hey, you need something to blow out!
The Potter-foreshadowing owl, meanwhile, was my cake and, as I recall, was made of two pudding-bowl shaped sponges stuck together to make a big oval of cake. The icing was chocolate buttercream with bits of Cadbury's Flake painstakingly stuck all over to make the feathers, while the eyes were chocolate buttons and the beak was a Brazil nut. It was yummy. So much so, in fact, that I wanted the same cake the following year, obliging my mother to go through the whole fiddly Flake-arranging process again. Kids, eh?
Anyway, the youth of today can have a chocolate Dalek cake from Marks and Spencer or go crazy and demand an expensive custom-made one (albeit oddly shaped and with a free typo!). But as with so many things, the old-fashioned way definitely has the most charm.
And by the way, any story in which the Daleks battle a giant owl would rock like nobody's business, n'est-ce pas?
It's a pair of birthday cakes, as cunningly made by my artistically-minded mum. Judging by the number of candles on each cake, the year must have been 1977, when my brother was 4 and I was 6 (his birthday is the day before mine, hence the joint celebration). In any case, it's plain to see that my interests have changed very little over the last thirty years...
The Dalek was my brother's cake: personally, I was extremely scared by Daleks back in those days, although not when in cake form (I was a wuss, but not THAT much of a wuss). I think the inside was made of various pieces of plain sponge, cunningly stuck together with jam and covered with blue icing, and it had candles in candleholders for the eye-stalk and blasters, and coloured Smarties for the round knobby bits down the side. The extra candle sticking out of the top of its head is not really canon, but hey, you need something to blow out!
The Potter-foreshadowing owl, meanwhile, was my cake and, as I recall, was made of two pudding-bowl shaped sponges stuck together to make a big oval of cake. The icing was chocolate buttercream with bits of Cadbury's Flake painstakingly stuck all over to make the feathers, while the eyes were chocolate buttons and the beak was a Brazil nut. It was yummy. So much so, in fact, that I wanted the same cake the following year, obliging my mother to go through the whole fiddly Flake-arranging process again. Kids, eh?
Anyway, the youth of today can have a chocolate Dalek cake from Marks and Spencer or go crazy and demand an expensive custom-made one (albeit oddly shaped and with a free typo!). But as with so many things, the old-fashioned way definitely has the most charm.
And by the way, any story in which the Daleks battle a giant owl would rock like nobody's business, n'est-ce pas?