How (not) to make an Iggle Piggle Birthday Cake

1. Realise, somewhere around 24 hours before the party, that you haven't actually thought about the cake, let alone purchased any of the ingredients required to make it. Write a hasty list, throw both kids in the car and head to Tesco.

2. Start food shopping. The catch here is that both kids know there is a party coming and you are shopping for the aforementioned party and are therefore highly highly excited and behaving in a manner which can only be described as absolutely nucking futs and absolutley irritating.

3. Hit a major snag when the amount of food in the trolley reaches a height where it can be reached by the toddler. The toddler will then take great glee in grabbing the nearest cucumber, pack of cocktail sausages or in fact box of eggs and hurling them across the aisle at bemused passers by. By this point I'm actually starting to feel really panicky - I can't locate the Cocoa Powder or Baking Soda and there is a feeling of immense explosive pressure building inside my head which isn't alleviate when I have to stoop to pick up the battered cucumber for the 115th time.

4. Having located all the food items head for the booze aisle......

5. Older child then decides to copy his brother and picks up a maxi-size bottle of Lambrini (pure class) which he promptly drops. Drops from the height of approximately 5 foot directly onto my toe. Glass bottle impacts upon toe. Glass does not break as toe clearly able to absorb quite a large amount of force and disipate it through my body. Pain? PAIN? I screamed. And I mean SCREAMED. And then I cried. I stood there in the middle of the 'cheap dodgy booze' section of Tesco with 2 shocked looking children in my trolley (one holding a mauled cucumber, the other holding thin air where once had been a Lambrini bottle) and sobbed big fat tears and then (to my shame) shouted 'NOW LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE! YOU'VE HURT ME!'. People stared. People really stared. I gave them evil looks and told myself that it didn't matter if they all thought I was scum - I would (probably) never see them again. Hobble to check out.

6. Go home. Unpack. Decompress.

7. Decide you can't face any actual cake making until the children are in bed.

8. Put children to bed - go to make cake, realise you have no cake tins suitable and you've forgotten to borrow your friend's.

9. Go to friend's house. Spend half an hour telling her how crap your day's been. Bump into her mum. Spend half an hour repeating the story to her mum. Go home.

10. Circa 10pm start making cake. Decide it looks a bit meagre so double all the quantities. End up with so much cake mix that it's flowing out of the bowl. Get stuck in with the electric whisk only to note an alarming smell of electrical burning.... Turn of whisk and resort to a big long spoon.

11. Open the wine that's supposed to be for the party.

12. Open the Hula Hoops that are supposed to be for the party.

13. Cake goes in oven. Finish wine.

14. Cake comes out of oven. It's too hot to touch let alone ice.

15. Kill time by starting on Lambrini (desperate times and all that....) and a pack of salami even though you don't like salami and, yup, it's for the party.

16. Roll out icing.

17. Try to remove icing from board only to find it's well and truly welded to the board.

18. Hack it all of with a sharp knife and start again.

19. Repeat ad infinitum until you decide that sod it, the cake will just have to look patchy - you can stick Smarties over the worst bits.

20. Start trying to dye bits of icing to make a representation of Iggle Piggle.

21. Realise there is a reason people hire professional cake makers and pay them for what is actually a skill. A skill I haven't got.

22. Dye various parts of my body a mix of red, black and blue. Swear a lot.

23. In trying to dye a wodge of icing red, actually manage to create a rather too realistic sugar-model of a placenta and nobody wants a placenta on their birthday cake. Throw artificial placenta in bin and try not to think about it.

24. Realise that Iggle Piggle's entire body is beyond you, so settle for his disembodied head (but not his placenta).

25. Somewhere around 1am put the remaining Lambrini back in the fridge, and retire to bed.

26. Wake up 5 hours later with a stonking hangover and realise you have a party to host.......

Here he is and he looks, to me, as if he's been created sometime around midnight by someone with a very sore toe and a litre of Lambrini in their blood stream. Every picture tells a story:

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