The Very Hungry Caterpillar cupcake birthday cake

I was generally an able student at school.  I was never gifted, but I did well in most subjects.  I leaned heavily towards the arts rather than the sciences, but even most sciences, I did OK generally.  Apart from Chemistry.  My loathing of Chemistry, if I'm honest, came from the fact I just didn't get it.  I was bad-ish at Maths, but if I concentrated - eventually - I'd get there.  With Chemistry, I could even see the stupid people in the room would understand a concept long before I did.

Now I'm older, wiser and fully Myers-Briggsed up, I understand that the reason I struggled with Chemistry was partly because I am unwilling to entertain concepts without practical application.  And of course, yes, Chemistry has practical applications - but generally not at GCSE level.  We were told by our Chemistry teacher, "Valency is all about hooks.  But not actual hooks.  There are no actual hooks.  Now you have to learn how many imaginary hooks each of these imaginary things doesn't have.  Understand?"

I mean, if I wanted to learn about imaginary things, I'd have taken Religious Studies.

So - other things I was terrible at: PE (I have never yet understood the notion of getting out of breath and sweaty for fun), Art (Mr Nunn was regularly bribed to "help" with my art homework) and Design, which was our school's name for woodwork.  Basically, I was rubbish at almost anything that involved co-ordination.

Which is why - long story short - I'm exceptionally proud of the birthday cake I made recently for the baby, who turned one a couple of weeks ago.  I will now do a long and boring post about how I created the Very Hungry Caterpillar birthday cake, and then I will smugly pin it to Pinterest, until someone points out that it would be more suited at a KillMe site.

I would like to say that I chose to do this cake because The Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of the baby's favourite books.  This is true.  But actually I chose to do the cake because it looked relatively easy.  I then hurriedly bought a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which she had never seen before in her little life, and read it to her ad nauseam in time for it to become one of her favourite books.  I am a terrible parent.

Also, because I would never make it as a food blogger because I forget to take photos, plus most of my cakes look a bit wonky, there will be huge stages missing.  Sorry.

First of all - the finished article, which actually I only have photos of because party guests remembered to take photos of it.  I told you I was crap.

The cake.  I'm going to tell you how I made this.

So, first I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes.  I used the Hummingbird Bakery's base, but I guess any chocolate cupcake would do.  I used chocolate to give an undertone of brown, as per the picture of the Very Hungry Caterpillar below.  There's something weird going on with my fan oven, and all my cupcakes end up with tilted tops.  Luckily, that's what a knife and a shitload of frosting are for.

This is what I was aiming for

I used gold foil cupcake cases, because I wanted it to look like the yellow outline of the caterpillar's body.  I got them on eBay.  I assume they weren't second hand.

Cupcakes made, now it was time for some bright green frosting.  I bought some of that Wilton green colour gel.  It's good stuff, but you'll need to wear gloves.  Two weeks later, something in my kitchen still has green food colouring on it somewhere, and whenever I touch it, I end up with vibrantly coloured hands for the next two days.  It's very odd.

I used a standard buttercream recipe because I find the Hummingbird Bakery's a little bit too runny for successful piping.  I added the horrendous colouring, some peppermint essence, and stuck the whole load in the fridge overnight.

Don't do that.  That was a mistake.  The next morning (the day of the party), the icing was solid and nowhere near the consistency needed for piping.  I ended up microwaving it to warm it up, which actually worked OK, but could have been a complete disaster.  I used a 1M Wilton icing tip, did a dot of icing in the middle of the cake, then a clockwise swirl, recovering the initial dot.  They looked OK.  For me.

So, next I made a sponge.  I had bought a small cake tin with a loose base - something like this (but again, I got mine on eBay).  It was hard to find a recipe for such a small sponge.  I used this one and whilst it tasted fine, I found it needed almost twice as long in the oven as the recipe suggested.  Weird, because the quantities were correct for that size tin.  Hey ho.

Next, I used two 12 inch cake boards.  Isn't it odd that we still use inches so much for baking?  I would never normally favour the inch over the centimetre.  But there we go.  I glued them together.  Then sellotaped them.  Then covered the whole freaking lot in white icing (which I had bought - ready to roll.  I'm not a masochist).  This was a fucking disaster.  I tried rolling it out on an iced surface first, and it fell apart as soon as I tried to move it.  The next try stuck to the table and I had to start again.  Then - finally - I decided to roll it out on the cake boards themselves, and that seemed to work OK.  I mean, yes it looked a bit shit in places, but isn't that the point of a homemade cake?

Then I iced a message onto the white icing.  I bought this icing kit, which came with a variety of nozzles, which worked quite well - though to be honest, you're never going to eat the icing covering a cake board, so I could have used a felt tip.  I marked out the message with a toothpick on the icing first.  I had to redo it originally because my initial writing was too small for the thickness of the icing.

DO NOT TALK TO ME. I HAVE A KNIFE.

After this, I had to ice the caterpillar's head.  I bought Tesco's bright red, ready-to-roll icing.  I rolled it out flat, stuck a bit of leftover buttercream all around the sponge (to make the icing stick) and then draped it over the sponge and cut off the extra bits.  It was easier than I thought it would be, though from this candid photo, you can see I'm a tiny bit stressed / pissed off / a tad fat. 

The rest of it was mostly an assembly job, placing the cupcakes to look like a caterpillar's body.  Mr Nunn helped colour some leftover white icing to make the sun, the feet and the eyes and nose (the colouring basically involved adding a few drops of food colouring to the icing and kneading until mixed).  Leftover red icing was used to make the antennae. 

And that's it.  Simple, eh?  (FUCK OFF.)

My very soul is covered in icing sugar. 

For the final presentation, I put a slice of watermelon (complete with hole) next to the caterpillar, to give it that Eric Carle look (see top photo).

Basically I am a genius.  I would say, "hire me to make you one" but I don't think I could go through that again.  Ever.  Next year she's having a Tesco Value Swiss roll with a number 2 candle stuck in it, and she can be grateful.

Next steps

OK, let's assume you've made it this far.  Your baby is about 4 months old and - whilst still liking to mix things up occasionally - probably doesn't scream randomly for about 40% of the day anymore. It can hold its fat little head up without it flopping all over its neck.  Life is good.

Now what?

Here are the items that got us through the next few months.

Just noticed this has been reduced by about £50 since we bought. Twats.

A Jumperoo  These are stupidly expensive at about £100.  Even second-hand, they seem to go for about £50.  So it's an investment.  But believe me, an investment that will pay off.  They are basically a giant contained baby bouncer (but not a walker) with music and lights and dangly things to pull.  We bought ours on the recommendation of a friend, and it's been worth every penny.  When we went away to South Africa for a couple of weeks, the baby actually mourned her Jumperoo and tried to substitute by jumping up and down on the laps of everyone who'd hold her.  When we came home, we popped her in it, and despite her jetlag, she literally jumped up and down for joy for a solid 30 minutes.  Even better, once they start crawling / walking / generally making life difficult for you, the Jumperoo acts as a sort of baby prison you can pop them in whilst they go vacant in front of CBeebies.  Because every time your baby moves, it will play an irritating selection of songs, you can hear that your baby is still alive whilst you're in the garden drinking vodka.  I mean, putting laundry away.

The downside is that unless you live in a mansion, they will probably take up at least 40% of your living room.  Our living room is quite small, and actually (after the sofa) it's the largest piece of furniture we own.  It's still worth it.


An iPad  OK, OK, I suppose strictly speaking this has to go in the "nice to have" rather than "need to have" category.  To further justify this really quite expensive purchase, I used it from her birth, and before:

- Maternity leave: listening to digital radio whilst drifting off into a snoozy stupor for most of the day.

- Labour: used it to track contractions, and then TheBloke (TM) comandeered it to play an Angry Birds marathon for the next 24 hours.  Twat.

- Midnight breastfeeding: downloading sitcoms and The Great British Bake Off to watch in the middle of the night.  To this date I can't look at a shortcrust pastry without lactating.

- Once the baby was about 3 months old: simple apps that she enjoys.  Our favourites have been the dodgily-named Baby Finger, the irritating but popular Giggle Gang (complete with one female character, who of course is pink) and Grindr.  Not really.  It's Goodnight Moon.

The iPad is also handy as it works as a quick "to hand" camera and video camera when she does something cute (or something embarrassing that might earn us £250 on You've Been Framed).

It's also great if you have friends and family with an iPad, as their Facetime app means that she can irritate Grandma and Grandad from a distance of about 150 miles.  In fact, sometimes I leave the iPad propped up, pop the baby in front of Grandma and Grandad on Facetime, go to the pub and let them babysit for a couple of hours*.

An outdoor picnic blanket  It's been a lovely summer this year, and for most of the time, crawling straight on the grass hasn't been a problem.  But being cooped up in the house all day is rubbish and if the grass is wet but the weather is warm, this can be the difference between creating a bald patch for yourself through repeated hair-pulling and actually having a decent afternoon.  Ours was about a fiver from Tesco.  We ordered it in grey, it arrived in pink.  What can you do?

* Social Services - I don't actually do this.  I go down the dogs.

Elegy for blackberries

The blackberries are almost finished in the garden.  This makes me disproportionately sad.  This is especially ridiculous because until this year, I didn't even realise we had blackberries in the garden, let alone mourn their passing.  But this summer, at home with the baby, picking blackberries has been one of our daily activities.  And it's coming to an end.  As is my lovely year at home.

I remember feeling a similar thing when I left school.  An A-level paper re-mark meant I took an unplanned year out between school and university.  I took a job at a local firm to waste time, kill a year, before I could join my friends at uni and my adventure could start.  That May, I remember having lunch with my colleagues in the beer garden of the local pub, and laughing so hard my stomach hurt. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted that the horse chestnuts were already green and prickly.  A whole school year had almost passed.  And I suddenly realised that this was my adventure.  When I did finally head off to uni in October, it was my new friends I missed, my colleagues, my adventure.

Anyway, I thought I'd continue with my Big List of Useful Baby Shit.  Not literally shit.  You will have enough of that anyway.  And I haven't found a use for it yet.

So - today - Things to do with your baby

First off, don't worry.  This isn't some Godawful Pinterest board where I will be recommending you make organic rainbow spaghetti in sensory tubs.  If you have enough time to do that, you've probably forgotten to feed the child or change your own underpants.  Double check, just in case.

This is just some stuff that got me through those first few months.

I had an emergency C-section, after full labour.  The technical medical term for how you feel after that is "fucking shit".  Now add to that a newborn that you know absolutely nothing about, plus the fact that the little screamy thing won't feed properly and won't gain weight.  Oh, and you're not allowed to drive, and walking really fucking hurts.  You're bleeding like a stuck pig and buses are out of the question because you can't lift the weight of the buggy up steps.

Honestly, I'd like to recommend stuff to do in this first 6-week period before you're allowed to drive again.  From memory, I sang a lot of Carpenters songs to the baby (seemed to stop her crying) and counted the minutes until TheBloke (TM) came home.  I also watched a lot of ER repeats (with subtitles as the crying tended to drown out the dialogue).  I told myself it was good for the baby as she might become a doctor.  As an extra bonus, I can now diagnose a sub-cranial haematoma at 30 paces.  The rest of my day was spent spunking tit juice into a milking machine.  If it was a good day, only one of us would be crying when TheBloke (TM) arrived home.

The good news is, nature is kind/spiteful, so you will actually block out all of the horrific memories of the first few weeks.

Once you can drive / walk a reasonable distance, here are my tips:

1.  Go to your local children's centre and register.  They will hand you a badly-laid out leaflet of all the classes they run for free!  FREE!  Yes, most of them will have a waiting list longer than your local orthopaedic surgeon, plus anyone referred by Social Services will automatically skip the queue ahead of you (apparently families with a history of child abuse need to learn nursery rhymes more than the rest of us do) but some of them are worth doing.

2.  Don't bother with baby massage.  All you will do is make your baby slimy with olive oil, nearly drop them on the floor, and then look at the half-bottle of oil you have left, and nine months down the line wonder if it's OK to put it in a salad.

3.  Find a baby music class.  We actually did this through the children's centre, and later paid for private sessions.  It was brilliant.  Not such much for the "there and then" (babies get a bit overwhelmed), but to give you a lot of new rhymes and songs to do at home.  Sometimes even you will have had enough of the Carpenters' version of "Ticket To Ride".  Unthinkable, I know.

4.  If you did NCT, try and meet up with people fairly regularly.  If you're lucky (I was) they will be generally nice, normal people.  If you're unlucky and they're all freaks, at least you get to look at other babies the same age, and think about how much cleverer/taller/fatter/uglier your own baby is.  On a serious note, it was through the NCT friends I made that I realised our baby wasn't gaining weight like she should have been in the first few weeks.

5.  The Breastfeeding Cafe.  I resisted this for ages.  Despite really (and I mean really) struggling with breastfeeding, I could not fathom wanting to go to talk to other people about it.  I had done my research online.  I had read pretty much everything La Leche League had published.  I could be told nothing new.  The last thing I wanted to do was to go and sit in a hippy cafe where someone would hold a knitted tit and tell me what I was doing wrong.

Well, more so I could say "I tried everything" before giving up breastfeeding, I did go along to the Breastfeeding Cafe, and it was nothing like I thought it would be.  (Well, apart from the fact they did have a knitted tit, but what can you do?).  There were free cakes, nice people (all terribly middle-class, because let's face it, the Jeremy Kyle ones are straight on the SMA), and yes, whilst I genuinely had done my research and wasn't told anything new in terms of facts, what I did get (and honestly, what I didn't know that I needed) was a big bucketload of emotional support.  But not in a drippy "let's hold hands and feel each other's energy" way.  In a, "Here, let me hold your baby.  Get yourself a cup of tea and some cake and actually go to the toilet for the first time today" way.  It was amazing.  I finally stopped breastfeeding about two weeks ago.

6. Until the baby is at least 3 months old, it doesn't really know which way is up, let alone whether or not you're stimulating it appropriately with Lamaze toys.  It could not give the tiniest fuck if you are lying it on the floor of your living room, or treating it to an African safari.  Believe me, I did both, and she's never mentioned either.  Feed it, clean it, don't let it cry for too long, and you're probably doing OK.

As I finish writing this, on what is - statistically - likely to be one of the very last hot drowsy days of summer, the baby is with the childminder for her first "settling in" period.  Again, the baby couldn't give the tiniest fuck.  So long as she gets fed.  Of course it's important she settles in.

But a part of me wishes she were here, with me, and that we were together in the garden, picking fat blackberries.