Baking

Melissa is braver than me; whereas I tend to shy away from Harry’s more messy activities, Melissa embraces them with relish.

Unfortunately, there was no escape last weekend when Melissa told Harry we would be baking.

Harry had tried his hand at baking a few days earlier – and, of course, thoroughly enjoyed himself. There were, Melissa told me later, a couple of disasters along the way: blue food dye was thrown everywhere and hundreds and thousands ended up in the quiche. On the whole, though, Harry had been very good, she said.

Despite these reassurances, though, I wasn’t convinced and, I admit, I was a nervous wreck when we started baking cakes. Harry was beside himself with excitement and set about cracking the eggs gleefully. As you can probably imagine, his hands were covered in it.

We did end up with a fair amount of shell in the mixture, which put me off straight away. I simply don’t like the thought of crunchy fairy cakes.

But while I was trying to fish out pieces of shell, Harry was busy tipping flour into the mixture. It was chaos, and the kitchen was practically engulfed in a cloud of flour.

By this point, Melissa seemed to be having as much fun as Harry, and she particularly enjoyed my futile attempts to restore order. Eventually, we somehow managed to get some of the mixture into the cake mould, although there were very few chocolate chips left by this point; Harry had eaten most of them before we had the chance to get our hands on them.

Incredibly, the cakes tasted fine at the end of it all, which probably means we’ll be doing it all over again this weekend. I can’t wait.