It’s Robyn Wilder’s birthday today, and I decided to mark this auspicious occasion by baking her a cake. I had two primary motives for wanting to do this:
1) Robyn has written LUV and HATs with me for almost two years now, and I wanted to show my appreciation. Also…
2) Robyn is extraordinarily sensitive to food colouring and I wanted to PUT HER OUT OF FUCKING ACTION FOR GOOD.
This is why the birthday cake I decided to make her was a rainbow cake. HERE’S HOW YOU MAKE A RAINBOW CAKE FOR ROBYN WILDER’S BIRTHDAY, THEN.
STEP ONE: Make a regular sponge mixture and divide it into six bowls.
STEP TWO: Put as much food colouring as you possibly can into each bowl, so that you end up with six different-coloured mixtures. She has to be allergic to one of them, after all.
STEP THREE: One by one, dollop a load of each colour into a cake tin…
…until you end up with two tins of cake mix that you’re reasonably sure will put Robyn Wilder into a semi-permanent coma at the very least.
STEP FOUR: Bake them until they look like this.
STEP FIVE: Put some jam on one of them, put the other on top and make some buttercream icing. Attempt to watch this video where Dan Lepard patiently explains how to ice a birthday cake, get about 40 seconds of the way in, think “This is a piece of piss” and then sort of fuck it up a bit. Also, dye the icing blueish because you’re pretty sure it was blue Smarties that sent all those kids mental a few years ago.
STEP SIX: Draw what easily has to be the most lifelike picture of Robyn Wilder’s face that anyone has ever drawn onto the cake with icing.
STEP SEVEN: Add some finishing touches, like eyebrows and a couple of chocolate stars that you think might at the very least cause Robyn Wilder’s throat to swell up until she can’t breathe any more.
STEP EIGHT: Cut a slice of the cake and give it to Robyn Wilder, then sit back and watch as all the colourings are absorbed into her system and she turns into a gibbering wreck and collapses, and then throw her into a ditch. Stuart always wins. STUART ALWAYS WINS.
ENDNOTE: Turns out Robyn isn’t that sensitive to food colouring at all, just one specific colouring that wasn’t even in the poxy cake anyway. I take it back. Stuart never bloody wins. Birthdays can fuck off.
