Easter bunny hits the bin.

Not a happy bunny

It all started with a trip to Lidl where I found these cute-as-a-button Easter cake tins.

Bunny and sheepy cake tin duo

I thought, “If I buy these, will they end up in the cupboard with the doughnut moulds and the pineapple peeler/slicer and the candyfloss maker and stay there without ever meeting a cake batter?”   So I bought them and rushed home to make cakes before I could say ‘waste of money’.  But it was a waste of money (and time) and there was quite a bit of shouting.  Here’s a gallery of pictures to show you what went wrong.

I tried all of those icing sugars in the picture.  Tate and Lyle and Silver Spoon are making a bloody fortune out of me.  Talking of Tate and Lyle, have you heard about the hotel in Soho where they’ve built entire rooms all made out of cake and icing?  Bloody madness.  The smell alone would give me an instant migraine.  It’s all sponsored by Tate and Lyle to promote some new freaky sugars which no doubt I will be buying soon to throw in the bin after another culinary diaster.  I think I have enough balls-ups for a book by now.

Wasting food infuriates me, especially as I’m meeting starving kids every week through my work with Grassroots.  But  no one was going to touch that bunny after the repeated icing attempts had soaked through the sponge to create one big, soggy, sugary monster.  My first mistake could have been that I greased the tin with oil instead of butter but who knows?  I’d have to do it all again to find out and I’d rather be playing in the snow.  How’s this for a bloody big snowdrift?  Zoe’s on top and Joe has disappeared somewhere inside.

Snowy Zoe

Oh, and one more thing.  My friend Ruth (she who threw up in my car) read my last post about Pavlova and said that if the egg whites don’t have vinegar and cornflour in them then they are merely meringue and not Pavlova.  So Nigella is right.  Click on that link and you’ll see Nigella has bloody lychees, passion fruit and raspberries in the recipe!  After she told us in ‘How to Eat’ that we must not ever be tempted to add any other fruit to the passion fruit.  I feel cheated!

Ruth also told me that I was wrong to say that Pavlova died if not eaten straight away and it would happily sit in the fridge overnight without turning to liquid,  even with all that fruit and cream in it.  That bit of information is, of course, irrelevant  because Pavlova as good as Nigella’s absolutely HAS to be eaten all up, straight away, without delay.

Have a lovely Easter.  Eat eggs.  Don’t bake cakes.