Schadenfreude

  Week 1 My thinking with baking is to increase the challenge as the week goes on. First then I start with cookies. The recipe has been given to me by my mother-in-law. It’s a Nigella episode. Before I talk about the cookies, let’s reflect on the name Nigella. Her father was Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. That’s right Nigel just added ‘la’ to his name to get his daughter’s name. So intent was he on passing it on, he wasn’t going to let the small matter of having a girl get in the way. Teachers can look forward to ‘Ryanla’ gracing the school registers in the future with my daughter explaining, “My name? Legacy to blame.” Away from the name, I was worried about doing a Nigella recipe because it’s a well-known fact that whatever ingredients you put down you need to add a healthy amount of innuendo. Nigella is the Queen of innuendo. What happens if I didn’t have the requisite amount of double entendre: Will it affect my bake? Would my cookies crumble? Would...

“Not another novelty cake, Ryan. Why don’t they teach you how to make something useful like a Sunday Roast.” I return home and my lovely mum is exasperated by the thing that sits on the kitchen counter. It is Food Tech GCSE and our unit of work is novelty cakes. I’ve been making them each week for about two months now, and there’s more to come. I’ve baked a football pitch, cricket pitch, rugby pitch and ice hockey rink. (The rink was a bid to show my versatility; I didn’t want to be typecast as ‘the pitches guy.’) God knows what mum is paying out each week to furnish me with these ingredients. The egg, flour, sugar and butter won’t eat into the bank account, but the icing sugar may well have gorged our holiday fund. Also, the bakes aren’t very good. I only chose Food Tech because it was the only option available to me. If Food Tech costs my mum an arm and a leg, Resistant Materials would’ve cost me an arm and a leg. I’m too much of a daydreamer to be trusted with that heavy machine...