Cheats sometimes prosper

It's been a month since my last post, for two reasons:

1. My household has mainly been living on the kinds of meals that are not worthy of being featured here. One dinner was fish fingers, oven chips and baked beans. Although slightly reminiscent of the Orange Platter mentioned in passing in the first episode of Cabin Pressure, it was actually very tasty. I am not ashamed.
2. I was writing to a deadline and struggling with it, though I did manage to meet it somehow. I even sneaked in the words 'paratextual' and 'metanarratives'. I'm not ashamed of that either, though perhaps I should be.

One of my household recently had a birthday, and birthdays mean cake.

During the Great Flour Shortage of the early days of lockdown, a friend pointed out that the supermarkets seemed to have loads of cake mix in stock. Head Chef bought some for emergencies but we didn't use it. Until now.

The birthday person asked for chocolate cake, so out came the cake mix. And here's the result.

7 candles unevenly spaced as a group of 3 and a group of 4. The birthday person may have been either 43 or 34 (or one of those ages and pretending to be the other). I am sworn to secrecy.

This cheat's cake was made from:

• 1 box of Betty Crocker's cake mix (chocolate flavour)
• 3 eggs
• vegetable oil
• water
• 1 tub of Lidl's own-brand chocolate frosting
• strawberries (home-grown)

Unsurprisingly, the cake was very easy to make. The only difficulty was that the icing tended to clump together, but dipping the palette knife in hot water and not panicking resolved that little difficulty. [Head Chef: "That was my idea. Don't forget to credit me."]

More importantly, this chocolate cake was absolutely delicious, especially served with extra strawberries on the side. Sometimes cheating is nothing to be ashamed of.

I only iced the middle and top of the cake, not the sides, so there was some frosting left over. Knowing from happy experience that chocolate buttercream can be rebranded as chocolate spread and eaten on toast, there was no danger of its being wasted. That makes 4 non-shameful things.

It's a piece of cake.