Cake by The Mud Pie Construction Company

It is nearly 8:00 P.M. and I have just finished cleaning up the kitchen. As it is Cath’s birthday I wanted to bake her a cake and make what ever she wanted for dinner. The early menu was perfect; she wanted barbequed hot dogs and chocolate cake. That was three days ago. Since then we have been through a couple of revisions before she finally settled on chicken as the main course. No problemo! I do chicken. But cake; now that’s a different challenge.

I started looking for a gluten free recipe on the web shortly after eight this morning. I wanted to be sure to cover all of her favorites: chocolate, caramel, & cream cheese icing. Of course the first thing to do was to blend some flours, some starches and some xanthium gum to make some sort of cake flour and while I was hunting out all of the various components and necessary ingredients I notice that there was no coco powder. I asked Cath: “Is hot chocolate the same”. It is not.

After rifling through a few possible substitutions I found that I could pulverize chocolate squares and that would do, but how many squares? Back to the internet to find that I needed two and a half which was no problem except that when I unwrapped them they did look ancient and unexpectedly light in colour. When you live in a village without stores you use what is at hand and thus the buff coloured chocolate squares were turned to dust and added to the flour.

As I followed the recipe step by step I eventually came to another troubling ingredient. I had honey but not enough . . . not nearly enough. Top off the honey with corn syrup and hope for the best. Eventually the cake was poured into two cake pans and placed in the oven.

I started keeping an eye on it at the half hour mark and was amazed to see that the mortar coloured batter had formed an outer ring that sort of looked like cake but the centers were billowing like flatulent balloons. I’m sure that the only thing holding the pans on the rack was the weight of the mortar.

Now I’m not much of a baker but I did recognize that cake with the texture of quicksand would be no match for the candles on Cath’s birthday cake so I left it to bake until nearly seventy minutes had past and finally the shish-kabob stick that I had been spearing it with came out clean and I was on to the filling and the caramel for the top.

I have never made caramel sauce before but when it was done it reminded me of those horrible candy apples at Halloween that after one bite you needed to brush with a dremel tool to get your mouth open again.

Dinner was great even if I do say so but it is now hours later and the cake, such as it is, still sits on the kitchen table waiting to be tested. The caramel topping is like a tortoise shell so I’m not sure how we will cut it but so far neither the birthday girl nor I have so much as looked for a blunt instrument with which to tackle it. I did venture to tap it with the back of a knife; it sounded like one of the stainless dog dishes being chased across the tile floor by a licking dog.