Mary Ford

My mother could whip up some amazing dishes but she never was a recipe book person. Most of what she made was innovation or what she'd learned from others.

A year after my muffin disaster i found an 1980s Mary Ford cake book at home. Cakes are gorgeous to look at but they are such a pain to main (in my perception that is).

The Mary Ford cakes were unbelievable. (You need to understand i lived in Oman, never had a birthday cake and the only cakes i ever saw were these from Al Bustan bakery or patisserie which let me tell you were hmmmm..average)

So my mom agreed to bake me a normal sponge when i was in school so that i could ice it when i got home. To a child the idea of sugar paste is like magic. You can make flowers, leaves, little babies, cupid with a box, cut out shapes and in all colours too! So that night i made the sugar paste in 3 colours put them in the fridge. Then i took it out n tried to roll it out and it was sticky and messy, melting in my hands and most of all disgusting to taste.

Any wayyyyyy i ended up only being able to cover the entire sponge with the sugar paste and cut out a flower and stick it on top. so much for all the variety of flowers one could make.

But i didn't give up. I continued to go crazy with the sugar paste trying desperately to make something with no avail and finally decided to move onto royal icing. Those of you who know me would know that im not the strongest person. I was using one of those plastic icing things at the time and i couldn't really push much of the icing out. So yeah i wanted to ice my name... instead i ended up icing those beginner star shaped dots all over the sponge. That was that; i tried making a marzipan cake and doing more royal icing but it never really worked out and finally i gave up.

I know the Mary Ford book was way too advanced for me at that age plus i didnt have a lot of the apparatus that i needed, so it was a disaster from the very beginning.