Rosie's school holds a cake sale once a term, and I must admit that my heart sinks when that little blue slip of paper appears in her book bag. It's not the baking I mind - it's more that...well...Rosie will want to go to the cake sale. The cake sale itself is possibly the most stressful school situation I've ever been in - yes, even beating that piano exam with the sight-reading section that brought me out in a cold sweat of paralysing fear.
Let me explain. The cake sale is always directly after school pick-up, so I'm toting the baby, plus the pushchair - and Rosie, her coat, her bags, and her daily mass of random scrawls artwork. It's held in the hall, with its one small door in and out, and many gym mats/folding chairs/loose carpet tiles to trip over. There are two hundred kids scrambling for cake, one hundred parents overheating in coats and scarves, several dozen smaller siblings getting lost under the tables, and OH MY GOD GRAB THE NEAREST CAKE AND LET'S ESCAPE THIS MADNESS BEFORE YOUR BROTHER STEALS ANY MORE BISCUITS.
Ack. Nobody warns you about these parental minefields.
Anyway, back to the baking. For a cake sale, a couple of things are important. You need a cake that is:
Ack. Nobody warns you about these parental minefields.
Anyway, back to the baking. For a cake sale, a couple of things are important. You need a cake that is:
- Portable (no fancy swirls of icing just begging to be squashed by an over-zealous cake transporter);
- Durable (no featherlight sponges which will rapidly fade to sad little crumbs after six hours in a humid school hall);
- Smallish (no filling-packed jumbo-cakes that have to be messily portioned up and stuffed into a sandwich bag).
If you have a Rosie, you also have to include chocolate, or it just doesn't count. So we opted for something that could be easily stacked, wouldn't crumble in transit, and could be easily sliced into handy-sized pieces - picnic slices.
These bars were a regular fixture of Sunday evenings when I was growing up, which goes some way to explaining my fondness for them. They also smell divine while they're baking - I mean, no cake smells awful, but these scented the whole house with a warm, coconut-y fragrance that drew everyone to the kitchen.
Rosie took the bowl and spoon onto the floor in her quest to scrape up every last smear of the mix:
I over-baked them a wee bit, so they were more chewy than the soft bars of my childhood memory - but they packed up into attractive little towers of deliciousness.
(Raw broccoli, my friends). Sigh. These bars were a regular fixture of Sunday evenings when I was growing up, which goes some way to explaining my fondness for them. They also smell divine while they're baking - I mean, no cake smells awful, but these scented the whole house with a warm, coconut-y fragrance that drew everyone to the kitchen.
Rosie took the bowl and spoon onto the floor in her quest to scrape up every last smear of the mix:
I over-baked them a wee bit, so they were more chewy than the soft bars of my childhood memory - but they packed up into attractive little towers of deliciousness.
And there you have it. I'll take my I-survived-the-school-cake-sale medal whenever it's ready, thanks.
On an unrelated note, here's what happens when your husband plays fast and loose with the butter knife.
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