Icing on the cake
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Icing on the cake By Deb Gale I have to reconcile myself to the indisputable fact that my children have gone all British on me. I suppose I only have myself to blame. I'm a serial goner for English accents. It all started with Hayley Mills, picked up steam with Julie Andrews, moved on to the Beatles and peaked with the Monkees. From the age of ten I had a British pen pal named Heathcliff. OK, it was just Cliff but I also used to fantasize that I could marry into royalty. I suppose I subconsciously held out until smack dab, right in the epicenter of Silicon Valley, I found a non-acceding but perfectly acceptable Brit, with a scrummy accent, for my very own. Fast forward five children later and I am surrounded by English accents. Our house echoes with those breathy, long A's, H's that start with Hay and Zed's, not Zee’s. I still hang on to a slim strand of hope that the older three might remain bi-lingual. I realize the younger twins are already lost to me. They think that Berkshire is spelled Bark-sha and if I listen to them recite the alphabet, I hear distinct annunciation of L, M, N, O, P instead of the American catchall "ellameno-pee". Our girls actually think in “fortnights”, they take “mathS”, do “prep” after lessons and “revise” for exams. Just this morning one daughter informed me that her nose was “well runny”, another had a “poorly” knee and the last of the big three told me if I made jacket potatoes for tea she was “dead cert it would be brill”. British slang is effortlessly superlative. Which compels me to relate the following. The girls just had a “cake sale” at school. We would call these bake sales and for the record, they do sell more than cakes. With my five little helpers, I organized a mini bake-off the day before the sale. We whipped up blueberry muffins, brownies and a batch of carrot cupcakes (relax, NONE of it was from scratch) thereby ensuring that our family would be well represented on the day. This is difficult to quantify, but mother "cred" gets a massive boost, when a mother is seen carrying copious quantities of painstakingly prepared home baked goods into school on cake sale morning. Just before 7:00p.m. that baking night, I realized I was out of frosting. I could have made some but I had already planned to cheat. I wanted that non-"scratch", ready to spread, hydrogenated fat-filled stuff in a can, preferably sour cream flavored. I sent one daughter into Waitrose while I parked. She emerged with a can of Microwavable Royal Icing. This was a problem. Royal Icing is not frosting. It is a smooth, flat sheet of liquid sugar, authorized by royal decree as the appropriate covering for every cake in the land. I think it was originally a medieval preservative so finding a microwavable, easy cook version surprised me. I hadn't expected the House of Windsor to get caught short and need to cheat on their icing too. It was also sneaky because fresh out of the microwave, it looked like seven minute frosting. It started out normal and creamy only to dry hard and flat on the cupcakes. Finally complete with their little bulletproof covers, the cakes survived their ride to school wedged between hockey sticks in the boot (trunk). I was really hoping that my first Royal iced carrot cupcakes would be a hit at the cake sale. I asked the girls how it went and they told me that they had bought most of the stuff we baked. I thought how nice and then made some sarcastic comment about being delighted that I got to pay for the cakes twice. My eldest told me not to get my knickers in a twist. I can feel it already, one of these days I'm going to be awfully English. About the author: Deborah S. Gale is a Pennsylvania native, loving mother of five daughters aged four to nine including two sets of twins. Married to a classically cynical, witty Brit with whom she enjoyed DINKY status briefly. She hasn’t held a full time bill paying or spa treatment-covering job since the children and spent most of the '90's as an expat. wife and mother in Paris and London. After 23 years of calling Silicon Valley home, she bid adieu to the South Bay in December 2000 when she made a permanent move back to the UK. She writes a regular column for the American in Britain magazine. © siliconmom
