The Birthday cake. By Andy Sanson

The Cake Birthday

By Andy Sanson

Another satirical article in the series by Andy Sanson. A diversionary and humorous look into years gone by from the retired Dental Technician.

What do you think would be one of the main priorities in the life of a Dental Laboratory? Maintaining a strong and loyal customer base, perhaps? Ensuring a contented workforce and continued product quality? Pursuing more and more knowledge about the subject in order to be able to offer clients the latest breakthroughs in service and technology as soon and as cost effectively as possible? None of the above. So long as you remembered to bring a cake on your birthday everything else was as though pertaining to a spider’s teeth – incidental.

Quite when this ‘tradition’ first manifested itself I never got to discover. It had the air of one of those things that’s just always been. Like pantomime dames and rickets.

“Hi there, you young bugger,” I would get on the 13th of April as I made for the door in readiness for the long trek home, “don’t forget the cake tomorrow.”

Now pardon me for being radical but I always thought that your birthday was supposed to be something special for you, not everyone else and their cousin Gav. Harry came from a family of chefs and his mum would always make a huge, pulsating gateau that had to be eaten through a straw and, of course, this was the mark by which all others were judged. You couldn’t just go to the corner shop and buy a box of Mr Kipling or a jam sponge. Oh no. Unless you were The Boss. And even then, you sent one of the Girls for it.

The first year I went overboard. I spent the lunchtime of the 12th scavenging around the library for huge tomes on Confectionary and Cake Making, that of the 13th in supermarket and general store gathering ingredients and that evening I commandeered the kitchen to prepare my work of culinary art. No Nigellas or Jamies in those days. All we had was Fannies. And Johnnies. But, I digress. Back to baking.

My mum, of course, offered her assistance and expertise, and she did make a very good coffee sponge, but I was seventeen years old the next day and ready to make my own way in the world.

“Thank you, Mother, for your kind offer but I feel I ought to be learning to stand on my own two feet. I will, however, bear your words in mind and be in readiness to summon you to my side should I feel the need.” .... might have been what I should have said. Being a spotty, stroppy acne-carriage of a teenager, I said, “Uhh!”

At the outset the scene was one of domestic bliss. Tidily scrubbed kitchen with ingredients, bowls, utensils and ephemera laid out in order of requirement as stipulated by the gigantic volume straining at the table legs. I was fully aware of the hilarious sketches involving Leslie Crowther and Peter Glaze in the children’s televisual extravaganza, Crackerjack (CRACKERJACK!!) – yes, thank you – and their tendency to finish up as a gooey mess with flour, eggs and sugar everywhere save for in the bowl and had no intention of following suit so I very carefully drew the kitchen scales from their resting place on a slightly-out-of-reach shelf and placed them on the work surface.

‘Beat 14 ounces of butter and 14 ounces of caster sugar together in a bowl until creamy’. Easy enough. Perhaps somebody should have told me to take the butter out of the fridge earlier and then it wouldn’t have been the consistency of a house brick. It became apparent that it would be the work of several hours as things stood so I had a brainwave. I could melt the butter in a pan and pour it on to the sugar. I couldn’t for the life of me think why the so-called cookery expert Craddocks had failed to spot that one and made a mental note to write to the BBC about it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to melt a virtually frozen block of butter in a saucepan. It’s not as simple as it sounds.

Before long there was a worrying aroma suggestive of something greasy welding itself to a very hot metal surface and lots of flaky brown and black bits bobbing around in the bottom of the

pan. Okay, things hadn’t started perfectly but it was early days. Eventually I had the butter at some sort of state where I could hopefully use it and poured it onto the sugar which immediately congealed into a lump which I belayed and battered with a wooden spoon until it capitulated and sank into jaundiced ooze ready for the next stage. ‘Beat in eight eggs’. I broke the first egg and plopped it into the mix where, of course, as the mix was still piping hot, it began instantly to evolve into an omelette. So I removed it as best I could and set it aside whereupon the dog promptly ate it, leaving me one egg short and the very first tingly suggestions in the back of my mind that things weren’t going to pan out as I might have wished.

OK, well, seven eggs can’t be that different to eight and some of the butter and sugar went with it so that probably means it’ll be ok. I wondered whether or not to adjust the remaining ingredients but couldn’t be bothered to work it out so I thought, it’ll be ok. ‘14 ounces of self-raising flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder, beat it all up together and then add the coffee’.

Ah!

Coffee!

That’s a point. Well, I’d had a few mates round to listen to the first album by some new band from Birmingham called Black Sabbath that I’d just managed to save up for. We drank a lot of coffee back then. All I could find was a cobweb-shrouded bottle of used oil from a tractor engine bearing the legend ‘Camp’ at the back of a cupboard. It had clearly been there some time but I saw no reason to doubt it would serve the purpose and poured what remained into the mix which immediately turned the colour of peat and gave off an aroma not dissimilar to wet leather. ‘Heat the oven to 170 degrees’ it said. Well, I’d already done that so I poured the stodge into a greased cake tin – and, no, I didn’t use something made by Castrol. I used margarine rubbed on with kitchen paper. A quick smooth over the top and into the oven it went. Bake for forty minutes, it said, so I took the dog for a walk.

I don’t suppose I have to tell you that it meant Centigrade and I did Fahrenheit, do I?

I opened the oven to be confronted by a tin full of cake mix that was exactly as it was when it went in, only hotter.

“Muu-u---u-um!”

All in all, it didn’t turn out too bad, I suppose. I managed to get the thing there on the seat of my bike and it sat, heavy and foreboding, in the cramped little kitchen until coffee time.

“Make the coffee, someone.” boomed The Boss. “Hope you didn’t forget the cake, you young bugger.”

What? No ‘Happy Birthday’, here’s a ten quid bonus, why don’t you knock off an hour early and go and have a Wimpy to celebrate?

One of the girls fetched the cake knife from the office – it was used for opening the post on normal days – and trotted off to do the honours. I thought my efforts at icing and decorating the thing might have attracted a comment or two but in that, too, I remained disappointed. I mean I’d even made a little Dental Mechanic out of icing sugar to stand on the top complete with white coat, bottle glasses and toothpick.

“Oh, not bloody coffee cake again. Have none of you buggers got ANY imagination?” This was a little unfair. The last three cakes from various staff members had been, I swear to this day, a leftover Christmas cake hacked into a circle and perfunctorily redecorated, a jam sponge with paper thin icing and hundreds and thousands and a sterling effort involving Rice Krispies, melted chocolate and Smarties. The Boss, having insisted on a plate and fork as opposed to the paper towels and teaspoons condescendingly provided for The Buggers, picked bittily at his piece of cake, twice the size of everyone else’s, naturally, screwing his face up into a vision that would turn the stomach of any respectable gargoyle sculptor in the Middle Ages before supposing that it would have to do.

A lesson well learnt. In future they got what they were given. And it did degrade year by year into a last minute purchase from up the road until, eventually, the whole thing fizzled out about 1980 when Harry said, “&^**^$£s to ‘em and their *&$%in’ cakes”, a sentiment that we all echoed and which endured until my departure from the place some eight years thence.