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RMB ([personal profile] changeling67) wrote2014-12-09 12:02 pm

50 Day Meme Challenge 2014 - Day 28

28) A favourite memory with a sibling?

Oh many - but as it is this wonderful time of the year, I might as well write about the ill-fated Christmas cakes.

Christmas Cake 1 - P1 was about 2 years old and I was living back with my mother.  She was due to go out to a do and asked me to mind the baking of the Christmas cake.  I used the timer, periodically tested it - all was fine with the world. My sister comes in and is on a 'Chicken Soup' diet, brews up this rubbery-smelling broth....then turns the cooker off.  I come down 1.5 hours later and have heart failure, when I look at the stopped dial. We both peer into the oven, to find that the cake has sunk and was the cake equivalent of Delabole Slate Quarry.  However it had at least baked and so with a flash of inspiration, I turned it upside down, smothered it in apricot jam and marzipaned the bugger before Madame came home.  She didn't suss, until she took a slice on Christmas Day, then demanded to know why we had a concave cake.

Christmas Cake 2 - My mother's old house was really cold and damp and icing the cake was a nightmare. It sweated like Nixon and not solidify.  My sister (note these things happen when she is around) recently had a hairdryer for her brithday - so we decided to blow dry the cake.  Sister put it on the wrong setting and blows it OFF the cake and up the wall. We wet ourselves laughing.

Christmas Cake 3 - Mum knew that Hubby didn't like Christmas cake icing and offered to ice it with white chocolate.  She bought what she thought was the correct chocolate and left things til last minute - only to find late on Christmas Eve that she had bought MILK chocolate.  Talk about sulk! She iced it, with bottom lip poking out. I had made a thumb-sized FIMO Santa and put him on a pair of KitKat skis.  Mum sulked even more, claiming that "It just looks like Santa has taken a s**t all over my Christmas cake!!" Sister just kept laughing at her. I sieved some icing sugar over the top, exclaiming brightly, "Look, it's just snowed - problem averted!" Mum in foul mood as sister just points and laughs at the 'Santa Poo' cake.

[identity profile] ecosopher.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 01:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Haha, these had me laughing too.

Where did you get the questions for this meme? I was thinking of doing it...

[identity profile] calico-pye.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 01:52 pm (UTC)(link)
I find random ones, then put the 50 Day ones at the end of the year - starting November 12th. If you hit the 50 Day Meme tag on my diary page, you'll find the original list behind the cut :-)

[identity profile] ecosopher.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 02:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Cool, thanks!

[identity profile] bethnoir.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 03:51 pm (UTC)(link)
I love the Christmas tree stories, my Grandmother was the Queen of cakes, but also had some disasters.

Her icing was often so hard you needed a chainsaw to get into the cake, so even though it looked beautiful and tasted lovely, you had to be patient to get a slice.

One year my mum and her disappeared into the kitchen to cut the cake after food and a few sherries, half an hour we went to see where they were and found them giggling with all the knives in the house out trying to get through it.

Another year she'd made a snowy slope out of icing with polystyrene under it on the cake. There wasn't much room in the kitchen, so my Grandmother decided to store the uncut cake in the oven. My mum turned the oven on and it was only when we smelled a funny plasticky smell that we realised!

[identity profile] calico-pye.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 05:01 pm (UTC)(link)
I love old family Christmas stories - one of my abiding memories of my sister is when she she had to get on a bus with a fully-fledged tree from the garden center. All I could see was a pair of feet and a voice going "Ow! ow! ow!" all the way up the road :-)

[identity profile] bethnoir.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Your sister sounds like a fun person to be around! I said tree in my comment, but I meant cake, have tree on the brain :-)

[identity profile] calico-pye.livejournal.com 2014-12-09 10:39 pm (UTC)(link)
The thing that Sis and myself have in common is a shared sense of humour. We keep each other sane :-)