The weekend away with Aunty, Uncle, Cousin, Mr and Mrs Martha started off with a long drive late at night, plenty of rain, and a baby albino koala (so cute!) and finished with an epic fail.
In between the long, lazy and country-fresh-air days and long, lazy and boozy evenings, we got stuck into the old family albums for proof of Mrs Martha's cake decorating prowess, and got to reminiscing. The one thing we tried to reminisce about but couldn't was the story of Puss in Boots. None of us remembered what it was or why we thought it was so cute nor why the hell the AWW put him in The Book.
PiB is particularly poignant because, according to my reliable interwebs source (wiki), the story is a French fairy tale written by a retired civil servant. Whoop!
Anyhoo, according to wiki, the story is "about a cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master."
The AWW prototype
Inspiration from the movie Shrek2
My feeling is that actually, PiB uses trickery and deceit to gain poor baked representations of himself from unsuspecting and not-particularly-talented girls like Martha and Betty (sorry Betty, I mean that I am not particularly talented, not you - of course!)
Naturally, I had my own muses to help me with the design, the furkids Carl and Lenny:
But in the end, they just slept while I toiled away with apricot and "leaf green" Vienna cream.
Anyway, thanks to the assistance of Mrs Martha and the supervision of Aunty Martha, we managed to put together a semblance of the original:
Degree of difficulty: 7.5 (licorice is a bitch to shape when it's thick like that, and because the cake had so many cut sides, it was hard to ice without getting crummy).
Time taken: 2 hours not including baking (which, I should add, I had to do from scratch under Mrs Martha's direction), and that was with my able assistants.
Alterations to the recipe: nary a glace cherry to be found at the farm, so we went with red smarties. Also, apparently they don't make green smarties anymore so I used blue. Next time? Ditch the licorice and pipe thick chocolate icing instead!
xxMartha
