Cake Hangover.

Yesterday. The School Fete.
After 4hours (12pm - 4pm) pretty much none-stop (two loo breaks don't really count?) of cutting up cakes, picking up cakes, putting cakes into little bags, serving ice-cream-cones, cutting up watermelon, peeling lollies from sticky wrappers, then cutting up more cakes, whilst surrounded by swarms of children clammy in the heat, all poking at the cakes, reaching and poking and pushing and jostling - my fingers transformed into one gigantic sticky piece of human sellotape.

Towards the end of the fete as I rummaged in my (now I know what it feels like to be Stacy on the market with a money-apron! Come on! Tenna for this tacky mini-skirt!) money-apron for change my hands would come out with huge clumps of money stuck to them, like dead flies on the tape in an unhygenic restaurant kitchen.
If I worked the cake stall for 4hours, how many cakes were there to start with? I'd like to say THOUSANDS of cakes but that'd be more than on a Sainsbury's shelf (not that I count the number of cakes on a Sainsbury's shelf). Hundreds, perhaps.
But as of yesterday I vowed I never wanted to make taste cut handle sell bag up another bleedin' cake again. EVER. Unless its for a member of my family on their birthday. Just the word cake which in fact used to be my most favorite word to roll around my mouth - now my fingers start to tingle in an anti-stick-panic and my stomach sort of wants to turn itself inside out. Maybe what I am experiencing is a cake-hangover. Maybe by tomorrow I will be back on cake.
The best thing about yesterday was that my very quickly whipped up banana-cake (whilst totally ignoring my wrestling children somewhere upstairs, screaming and kicking about completely hating each other for 1/2hour) won the Best Cake Contest. I think I get a certificate (definitely framing that one - much better than a degree) from Patience, the school cook who judged the competition. After I slipped her a tenner I knew the prize was mine. Ha ha ha! All mine! I'm THE cake maker... (queue strange power-fueled-psycho voice).
(No, honestly I didn't slip her a tenner. I'm not that loaded! £10! Couldn't even have slipped her a one-er...)
And that was basically my experience of the School Fete. A wholesome get together of the local communi-dee a lot of burgers (we had some banter, us cake-ladies and the burger-boys... yeah. Like, can we borrow some change lads? or hey, fancy a free bun, men-with-metal-spatula's...? -you know, that sort of hilarious off the cuff improvisation) some singing from the (sweet) children, some dancing from the (sweet) children and some (sweet) children in my face for 4hours demanding ice-creams, cakes (NOT that one, THIS ONE), ice-lollies (sorry they've all run out) and watermelon. And fingers like human-sellotape.
Hey! Put me on the rosta for next year!

By 9.30am I was back in the kitchen post-drop-off - Mol & Liz deposited in their various institutions - cracking eggs into a bowl of super-gloopy-Nigel Slater chocolate brownie mix (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/18/nigel-slater-chocolate-brownies). My house smells like I'd want it to smell if I was trying to sell it - I'm sure this sort of smell adds about 40% to the sale-price. Guaranteed fresh-baking-smell! This house comes with 3 loos, 100-year-old-cracked-plaster, original cornicing, slightly rotting sash windows and, yes, this could be yours, the smell of freshly baked cakes Every Morning! All for £3,456,999!
Anyway. So the house smells good. But it looks pretty awful as we're having it re-painted on the outside, hence reference to rotting sash windows. Phil-painting-guru has discovered that pretty much every windowsill has rotting wood on it somewhere. Which he's picked off with such diligence, a bit like the attention I give to the ever present pimples on my face, and has refilled with some kind of stinky filler - wrinkles cracks & all - gone! Vanished! I'm nearly tempted to get some of his filler and slap it onto my own wrinkles and cracks but the effects may not be so positive on a human being.
I'm baking brownies, and then I'm moving onto banana-fairy-cakes and then hopefully a Victoria Sponge - this a small offering to a friend who has recently gone through the life-mangle, and I'm hoping that the sugar & chocolate & sparkly decorations will provide very small relief at a very horrid time. I have to do the baking now whilst the house is kid free so that M&L don't realise that all this scrumptiousness has been produced for someone else.
5 more minutes on the pinger then down to the kitchen, out with batch3 of brownies. Then down to the ever-handy Tesco Metro at the bottom of my hill, more butter, sugar, eggs (maybe some bagels for lunch) to restock for the next baking adventure.