Chocolate cake

I’ve loved chocolate cake for as long as I can remember.

I didn’t have the opportunity to try baking my own chocolate cake for many years. When I finally met my husband I began to try and they burned every time. No matter what I tried they never rose, were always inedible.

Friends, acquaintances, strangers in the street all made it look easy. They baked chocolate cake with apparent ease, sometimes even when not really trying. It was mystifying, unspeakably frustrating and heartbreaking. I would meet people through work who didn’t even like chocolate cake, ended up just giving them away. People ate chocolate cake in my face and I was so, so hungry. Starving.

Eventually a professional chef got involved and was able to raid our larder and get my temperamental oven to bake a cake. It was better than I ever could have imagined. It was however a one off. I would have loved to bake more but again they burn and fall flat. The professional chef option is out. It’s prohibitively expensive and I was warned the first time that it was a miracle my oven worked on that occasion and was unlikely to again. I’m back to the hunger pangs as I watch friends eat their beautiful home-made cakes so casually. I recently had to sit through a day of online training on zoom with several colleagues, three of whom were eating chocolate cake unexpectedly during the training, which ironically was about baking. It threw me for a week. The hunger pangs are vicious.

I will never eat chocolate cake again. I try every day to cope better with the baking around me and some days are easier than others. Today has been a bad day. Tomorrow will hopefully be better.

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