Creative?

The demented barking of the damned dog next door drove me from my bed and prompted me to complete one of the chores that really needed to be done.

I have accepted some financial advice and acted on it.  In my view anything which keeps my money away from my hands is a good thing.

I do not have a sophisticated view of money and I fail to understand the theoretical underpinning of my finances by the abstract concept of “money”.  I only find money easy to understand when it is translated into something which appeals to me more – like, for example, gadgets.

Even I understand that a whole-scale application of my “theoretical to practical” eventually, and probably quite quickly, leads to Micawber-like poverty.  It is therefore advisable for me to move money as an easily spent commodity into something where the money is held captive to be released to me at a later date.

My bank’s desire to take over the universe by issuing bonds or debentures or some such thing seemed to offering the sort of safe (for a bank) haven for my money.  To induce punters to give them the billions that they are after they offered something nearer (but by no means close) to the amount of money they make by “looking after” the money they already have on deposit.

My bank has now sequestered a small chunk of my liquid assets in Spain, so I needed to get some of my devalued money from Britain to make up the deficit. 

It is heart breaking to listen to the exchange rate for the pound when you consider that when I first came to this country a Euro was worth just 70p!  Still, thinking about these things doesn’t help personal stability and one must go on, hiding money in various financial institutions in the hope that the money will keep pace with inflation!

Exhausted with and by my financial wheeler-dealings I turned with some trepidation to the completion of Toni’s Name Day Cake.

I retrieved the frozen base from the fridge and considered it afresh.  To be frank it did not look appetizing but I consoled myself with the knowledge that the base was the least of my worries because it was going to disappear under a mixture of calories beyond calculation!

Since Toni likes strawberries I sliced some fresh strawberries that I found (in the third shop of looking) and placed those on the base and put the whole lot back into the freezer.

The main part of the cake consists of whipping cream, grated chocolate and vanilla sugar.  I added the last because I bought it for the Brownies and I am damn well going to use it.  I also added a pinch of salt because I was told to.

I made the important discovery that grating chocolate by hand is both time consuming and dangerous.  I also discovered (though too late to be of use in this case) that putting cold chocolate into the liquidizer does in seconds what took me longer.  Much longer.  And at the cost of a fragment of skin.

The next bit, frankly, did not work.

Once the mixture was nice and firm the instructions I was given demanded two whipped egg whites be “folded in gently”.  There were two problems here.  The first was that Toni is, to put it mildly, paranoid about raw eggs and the second problem was the way that I whipped them.

I suppose that a real cook would have meticulously cleaned the liquidizer that I was using to whip the cream, sugar and grated chocolate and then produced whipped egg whites of meringue quality.

My version of putting the egg whites into a partially scraped liquidizer did not produce what I vaguely remember of this sort of thing having to form “peaks” when a spoon was lifted from the mixture.

This never happened.  But I was determined not to waste two eggs so I folded the muddy liquid in anyway.  The resultant goo was spread over the frozen base and the cooling strawberry remains and returned to the freezer.

It was my artistic intention to cover the top of the cake with Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons™ or some sort of foreign rip-off.  No Buttons™, not even for ready money, could be found.  So I decided to cover the top (and the uneven surface) with a masking covering of tiny chocolate biscuits and then use a paper doily as way of producing a fetching pattern on the newly flat surface.

Having lots of bloody fragments of chocolate left over from the Great Grating Fiasco it was my intention of scattering the fragmented remnants artistically over the top of the top of the cake.

It was at this point that I discovered the efficacy of the pulverising propensity of the liquidizer.  A few seconds on the “ice cube smashing” setting (which certainly does not work for ice cubes) and I had chocolate powder.

The surface of the cake was therefore flattened with the powder and slices of strawberry placed around the edge with three whole ones for the centre.  The whole strawberries made the cake (still in its tin) too high to go back into the place made for it in the freezer so they have been reserved for placing at the last possible moment – perhaps on a nest of cream.

Going out to lunch in the Maritimo Restaurant seemed the least possible recompense for all my effort!

We did actually sit outside and enjoy the windy sunshine with everything on the table weighted down to stop it blowing away.  Once again excellent value and a view which never fails to interest.

Of course, yet another problem concerned Toni’s Name Day Present.  Which I have not bought.  And I have been told that my holiday on Monday is actually a holiday for everyone and that no shops are going to be open on Monday, when I had planned to bring together my scattered wits and find Something to give to Toni on his special day.

Sufficient, as they say, unto the day is the evil thereof.  I remain confident that somewhere will sell me something that Will Do.

And The Family are going to arrive for lunch.

Hey ho!