November: A Mother's Disapproval

“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 machinery. I’d be there at the lathe, wood in hand (stop it!), fantasizing over asking some girl out, that I’d be completely impervious to the fact my hand were lying dismembered on the ground.

Mine didn't look like this.

Even though I’m not great at Food Tech, I enjoy the lesson. Ms Bonnington likes me because I support Watford FC (she found out when I did the football pitch cake and did the sidelines yellow and red). She also finds me endearing. I hope people don’t mind me saying, but there’s a Hugh Grant quality to me. Not in terms of look or peccadillo for prostitutes; more in terms of making a hash of something and bumbling my way into pity. Like a loyal wife, I let Ms Bonnington down regularly but she always takes me back.

Given Paul Hollywood hasn’t been invented yet, there is a surprising number of boys in the class. They’re all my best mates – perhaps it was the rejection of gender stereotypes that brought us together. To a man, they’re all woeful at baking. These are the spoilt young boys that stood by and watched their grandma do the heavy lifting, the elbow grease mixing, then picked up the spoon to lick the bowl. The girls, on the other hand, have skills. They have flair. Lining up our bakes at the end of the lesson isn’t comparing apples with apples; it’s isn’t even comparing apples with kiwi; it’s comparing apples with Disaster Zones. The girls carry showstoppers home; we heartdroppers. We prodigal sons have been gifted expensive ingredients and here in the Tupperware lies the change, the rags, of our profligacy.

They looked like this.

This month, however, I’m going to try and win my mum round with competent talent, as opposed to bumbling charm. Will I get the coveted Theivamanoharan handshake or the infamous Fiona headshake? The stakes have never been so high. Tune in at the end of the month to hear how it’s gone.