Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Things have been bum­bling along in a state of non-progression, lately.

I am still wobbly. Dr Nice insists on fid­dling my dosage in micro­scopic incre­ments so a whop­ping three months after my ini­tial whim­per­ing plea for a bit of peace and quiet from the Crazy, I’ve only had my dose of Citalopram increased to 30mg (upped from an ori­ginal dose of 10mg) a day. Which doesn’t actu­ally sound that measly when writ­ten down, but it is. I prom­ise. Either that, or this tiny, little blog­ger has some stonk­ing, dirty-great help­ing of the Crazy. Which on reflec­tion, is prob­ably true.

I went back to see Dr. Nice about 10 days ago and after endur­ing a gradual wean­ing pro­cess (and suf­fer­ing with­drawal symp­toms that made my innards feel like they were doing the Can-Can), I am now on another micro­scopic dosage of another med­ic­a­tion (10mg of Seroxat/Paxil) and now we have to start the whole pro­cess ALL OVER AGAIN. And all the while, I am still wobbly with wob­bli­ness that is dis­tinctly very wobbly, indeed.

When I feel wobbly, I don’t tend to feel very wordy, hence my blog­ging blank­ness. Any words I do have in between wobbles have to be spent on my new advanced cre­at­ive writ­ing course that I star­ted about 3 or 4 weeks ago. The course mater­ial is going down well and I think I’m absorb­ing the the­ory and read­ing bits, I’m just sor­row­fully lack­ing in words at the moment, but I’m hop­ing that will change. I have notes and ideas I just needs more words. I’m hop­ing that writ­ing here will unbunch all the words and leave some good ones free for my assignment.

So, for a lack of words, have some cake instead:

Our most ambi­tious cake pro­ject to date; this cake, which was given to my Mum for her 50^th birth­day earlier this month, very nearly ended in tears. We had never attemp­ted a tiered cake before and as a res­ult had relied in the past on either my own pseudo-fairy cake recipe (wherein I just mul­ti­plied the quant­it­ies ad infin­itum until we got enough mix), or a sponge recipe K had found in the back of an old cake dec­or­at­ing lib­rary book (that we no longer have access to).

A tiered cake requires a much more robust method than the ad-hoc ones men­tioned above: The cake has to be dense and sturdy enough to cope with lev­el­ling (to get a good, even fin­ish when icing) and also be able to carry the weight of each tier, com­plete with dec­or­a­tion (bear in mind that each tier itself com­prises of 2 lay­ers of sponge and a jam and but­ter­cream filling), and a “hid­den” cake board that sep­ar­ates and sup­ports each tier (and also helps when cutting/serving).

So, we found a heavy-duty Madeira sponge recipe and set to work. Only, it ended up resem­bling bis­cuit on the out­side and my Mum’s boggy, sticky, York­shire Pud on the inside. Bugger.

So, we tried again. And again. And again.

Sev­eral tweaks, 5lbs of cement-like cake destined bin-wards and numer­ous explet­ives later, we’d cracked it, although by this time, it was about 1 o’clock in the morning.

Two days later, K had fin­ished work­ing her usual mas­tery in rolled royal icing and florist’s sug­ar­paste to pro­duce some funky, con­tem­por­ary stripes and a simple, mod­ern take on the more typ­ical floral designs usu­ally found on cakes intend for “ladies of a cer­tain age”. (My Mum’s going to splat­ter me for that one!)

For the full pic­ture story, includ­ing shots of the cake prior to being dec­or­ated, check out the entire photoset:

Click the mosaic to view the entire set