pandemian

22 August 2007

I do not cook. This is for two reasons; a) I can't be bothered and b) I don't generally care for food unless it comes wrapped in paper and covered in salt, vinegar and occasionally that fluorescent orange burger sauce that they make in disused quarries just north of Dungeness. The latter means I've never been particularly troubled by the former unless my parents are visiting and I need to pretend there is something in my kitchen other than tea bags and half empty jars of Marmite lest they carry me off and force feed me things made from suet for the next six months. Such then was my faint but palpable surprise when I woke up one morning a couple of months ago with an unassailable desire to make cake, particularly perplexing considering the only baking I had been known to do previously was with a packet of Betty Crocker's brownie mix and a special ingredient that you won't find in Tescos next to the dried peel.

The road to small cake nirvana was a particular troubled one for such a spectacularly untalented cook such as myself but I persevered, spurred on by the knowledge that once I had perfected it never again would I be forced to scuttle shamefacedly to the 7-11 down the road to clear them out of Mr Kipling's Fondant Fancies whenever I fancied some cake at 3am. It is then with a jubilant heart, a spirit of sharing and a blood sugar level hovering just shy of coma that finally I give you the recipe for Pandemian's Perfect Fairy Cakes. All the sweetness and light of their creator, none of the nasty taste in the mouth after consuming.

Makes 12, serves usually just me before they've even had a chance to get cold.

125g sugar
125g butter (Margarine, vegetable spread or any of that fake butter nonsense with an unconscionable pun for a name absolutely will not do. They'll taste the same, it's just that people on diets irritate me.)
125g self raising flour
2 eggs
One dollop oil

Stick in a bowl and mix enthusiastically. Eat half the mixture raw, put the rest in the oven and bake until you remember to take them out. You will end up with perfectly formed but utterly dull little yellow cupcakes, the kind of dessert your mother always insisted was all the after dinner treat you were getting when really you were craving a paddling pool full of Smarties soaked in the juice of the archangel Gabriel. To make them more exciting you need to add things to the basic batter and this is where you can really indulge yourself and achieve a pinnacle of personal and culinary satisfaction that repeatedly stabbing a picture of Nigella Lawson through the eye with a compass just doesn't provide. Any more.

I recommend the following:

* Fun size Mars Bars
* Ovaltine
* Sweet liqueurs (one measure per cake always does the trick; if you can be bothered you might need to add more flour to compensate, if you can't, just drink straight from the bowl with a straw)
* Fizz Wizz
* Banana milkshake mix with foam bananas (this being the closest your cakes should ever come to fruit, you understand)
* Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
* Twenty pence pieces

A book deal even bigger than Delia's is surely only just round the corner.