Seth and Paddy bake a cake

Seth and Paddy bake a cake
Originally uploaded by aderieg

For some mysterious reason, Paddy and Seth decided to bake a cake today.

There has been a lot of talk about cakes recently, because in the play "The Last Days of Humanity" that most of my household is involved in, there is a horrible scene where the "officers" eat cake as they sign execution orders, and while Sascha is being marched off to be executed, Alex is sent to fetch the cake. As all the extras have different responsibilities for props (Christopher is in charge of the prostheses), Alex is responsible for ensuring that cake is there every evening and that it is edible, because one of the "officers" does actually have to eat it. This has not always worked out very well. For that reason, there has been much discussion of cake among the extras that come and go at my house, and Sascha baked a cake himself that he brought to the performance the other night when I went again.

However, that was not the reason why Paddy and Seth decided to bake a cake today. They may know why, but to my knowledge no one else does.

For a long time, Paddy enjoyed decorating American style cakes, although he was less interested in the actual baking part, so he still has a lot of cake decorating supplies that Grandma, Amy and Kris sent to him over the years. Seth and Paddy together were surprisingly efficient (although I think it is mostly Seth, who is second only to Peter when it comes to household efficiency): they checked the recipes, went shopping for the missing ingredients, made a breathtaking mess in the kitchen and on the table, and finally ended up with a cake intriguingly decorated with a picture of a voodoo rag doll and no mess.

They stood for a moment rightfully admiring their work, and then Paddy said cheerfully, "Right, let's eat it then. Who wants a piece of cake?"

Everyone who was offered a piece of cake was a bit startled and questioned whether he really wanted to eat the cake immediately after going to so much trouble to make it. Paddy naturally asked, "Well what else should I do with it?" Naturally he took nice pictures of the cake to go into his collection (although I have no idea where his collection of cake and marzipan figure pictures is now), and it was not intended to be taken to the play, so eating it was the obvious thing to do.

That being the case, I made tea and we sat down together at the table to eat the cake. Once he actually had a knife in his hand, however, Paddy suddenly found it surprisingly difficult to cut into it after all. Eventually, though, we had cake with our tea, and it was very, very, very sweet. Since the recipe for the icing is written in Grandpa's handwriting, Paddy was thinking about how nice it would be to be able to share the cake with Grandpa, who would probably actually appreciate it, so Seth got hear all about Grandpa as we ate cake.

It is not a very big cake, but I somehow suspect that it is not going to disappear as quickly as cake usually disappears at our house. Nevertheless, it was an interesting way for Seth and Paddy to spend the day.

More pictures (just mine, not Paddy's) here