With the next big event being Christmas, there’s only one option for #50Desserts so No. 18 will be a Christmas cake!

Which cake recipe I use is yet to be decided. I have a few tried and tested recipes from my family, one of which has fond memories from earlier this year, so I think that will definitely be used for at least one of the cakes I'm going to make. I'm going to bake two, maybe three cakes. One for home and two for my fundraiser.

The last time I made a Christmas cake was way back in my secondary school days. Thinking about all this now brings back a few memories of school, so here's a little story.

I really don’t remember being that interested in cooking at the beginning but it was a break from other lessons i.e geography and maths! When I say we made a cake, I mean sitting through a theory cookery lesson first then a practical one the following week. The first lesson involved copying the ingredients off of a projector. This wasn't very clear or easy to read and copy from, it was quite a traumatic time for anyone including me who was short sighted. Especially if you only had the assistance of pink national health glasses to help you through this tedious task. You had to be quick too as the slides would only fit so much of the writing on. This meant that every five minutes or so the teacher would move the slide up and the previous text would be lost!

As for the next part, watching the cookery teacher measure and mix the the ingredients together... well this was just a great time to have a quick catch up and giggle with classmates I didnt see in other lessons. After missing probably the most important part of the lesson and relying on a badly scribbled ingredients list it was over to me to prepare for our practical lesson.

Of course, the torment had only just begun. We had to source the ingredients once home and roughly measure it all beforehand. This in itself was a massive chore. We didn’t have a big supermarket near us back then and the corner shop was somewhere that stocked penny sweets and lucozade and of course home pride sliced bread. It was all just too much like hard work.

Then there was the chore of dragging all the ingredients into school in various freezer bags and containers. This which wasn’t much fun either and completely ruined any fashion look I was trying to pull off at the time. I think this was at the stage where I had the ultimate school bag and so on trend. A large black patent hand bag with some non designer name on the front. This would contain a thrown together sandwich complete with sandwich spread filing, wotsits, polos, some nasty perfume and ten silk cut squeezed in the inside zipped pocket and a few token school books.

Oh, of course not forgetting the pencil case. Which to make it cool and bespoke would I would have scribbled the names of my favourite bands including Duran Duran, and Spandau, plus some boys name I fancied at the time, all inclosed in big love hearts with arrows through them. Not really much room to throw in my cake ingredients! This meant we then had to carry them all in a tin with the baking tin. Not very cool and very arkward on the bus!

With this part of the task acheieved I just had to get all the ingredients to the cookery room before morning register and place it in the allocated section for my group. Remembering to take out what needed to be refrigerated and finding a space in a very tiny fridge that accompanied at least twenty of us. The school kitchen seemed quite big at the time but the actual baking side is all a bit of blurred a blurred memory for me. 

I do remember having to line the tin inside and out and that it was a real mess and I’m sure took me much longer then it should have done. I just wanted to get on with mixing the ingredients together and producing an end product. This was not going to happen as our lesson just wasn’t long enough and we ended up taking home a raw mixture that had to be baked at home. 

Trying to explain this on the 403 bus to some of the older girls who had never done this was just not worth the effort and was met with a lot of banter. I was glad to get home and hand it over to my Mum, complete with baking instructions. I had completely lost interest by this time. It would have been a Friday afternoon, so choosing between baking a cake or getting dolled up with my azure blue mascara was a no-brainier and much more exciting way to spend the start of my weekend.

Mum was quite happy to take over the baking stage and let me have the glory of the end result. It was a sucess if I remember rightly and it was enjoyed, but by who I can’t remember. I am looking forward to doing this one though, for a very different reason. 

Back to the plan. I think a raffle will be the best bet to raise a bit of money. I have a few ideas of where to base these raffles although, I have yet to ask permission, but I am feeling positive about their response so fingers crossed. For now I will concentrate on the mix and bake and approach the subject once I’m happy with what I’m selling.

To be continued!