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Let Them (Not) Eat Cake

Dessert Disaster at Christmas Dinner

By S. A. CrawfordPublished about a year ago 4 min read
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Image: Nicole Michalou via Pexels

We take people in at Christmas, my family; we always have. A small family of mostly women, we don't have many children around to watch, in fact at 29 I'm usually the youngest at the table. So we take people in - friends and neighbours. Over the years our table has seen food, jokes, and customs from Baltic, Celtic, and American friends of all ages, and usually, it goes well.

The Christmas before the first Covid lockdown was a little different, however. A good friend of mine had come to stay, and a friend of my Grandma's was coming to dinner. To that end, I decided to make something special for dessert; a big, rich chocolate fudge cake with a sour cherry sauce. While the turkey brined on the 24th, I made the cake itself, then whipped up a chocolate ganache while my friend, we'll call her Anna, and I drank wine. Filled with ganache, scraped with creamy chocolate icing, I let the cake rest in the chaotic fridge overnight so that it could be decorated the next day.

On Christmas morning, while the dogs went frantic tearing loose paper to shreds and gran sipped hot chocolate with my mum, Anna and I put the turkey in the oven, low and slow, peeled and par-boiled the potatoes, and then made breakfast.

If there's no rest for the wicked, I must be a true sinner because Christmas day is never restful in my house. Once the turkey is in the oven, it's time to wash, dress, and get moving. First I drive to my grandmother's, drop off and pick up presents, speak with the extended family, make tea, et cetera. Then I drop by any friends who will be in, especially those with children, drop off presents, make a fuss over dogs, and generally stress out until its time to go home and see more family as they arrive in the afternoon. Make more tea, keep glasses filled, watch the food and prepare sides.

This is the routine, every year. Of course, that year, in 2019, I also had to jump in the car and pick up my grandma's friend, we'll call her Sara, and bring her to the house. At 3 pm the sides went in the oven and the wine started to flow. At this point, I had the sudden idea, grease and sweat-slicked as I was, that it would probably be easier to have Christmas on an exposed hillside than to maintain organization in this chaos. That's when I remembered the cake. Anna helped me clear a space and prepare the rest of the icing before she set the sour cherries to boil with sugar and lemon.

It should have been fine... but as I turned to ask Anna for the edible gold glitter, my apron caught on the cake stand and sent the cake to the floor with a quiet squelch that silenced the house. I wanted to cry, and no one around me seemed able to decide what to do. Then my grandma said,

"Oh, honey, it's ok - I'll clean it up. You sit down."

She stepped forward to help and promptly stood in the cake, was jostled by her friend Sara, put her second foot into the heart of the smashed cake, gasped, stepped away, bent down to pick it up... and farted.

If this sounds like a slapstick Fawlty Towers skit, that's pretty much what it felt like. In a few seconds the need to cry turned into the kind of gasping, gaping silent laughter that cramps stomach muscles and feeds into itself. The dogs milled around the kitchen, leaving chocolate pawprints as they licked our fingers, faces, elbows; whatever they could get close to.

We scraped the chocolate cake, well-trodden, into a bin bag and washed the floor before sitting to eat. Turkey, roasted vegetables, pigs in blankets, thick gravy. Everything we could want... except for chocolate cake.

For dessert, we had Quality Street chocolates and the remnants of the breakfast pancakes slathered in jam or honey while playing Monopoly (which, yes, ended in an argument as expected). Not elegant or fancy, but it stands out as one of the best Christmases I can remember; perhaps because, for once, the busyness of the day was broken up enough for me to actually make a memory.

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About the Creator

S. A. Crawford

Writer, reader, life-long student - being brave and finally taking the plunge by publishing some articles and fiction pieces.

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