Eat Me

Bake it with love? I don’t think so.

Don’t waste time baking it with love. Bake it for the world to remember. Bake it to ignite the zeitgeist. Bake it to incite a riot. Bake it just to really piss off someone else. Bake it to win, bake it to fight, bake it to overthrow a government. Bake in the taste of your vitriol, your loathing, your deep-seated, stagnant hatred.

‘But but but they can taste the love when you’ve baked with it’.

‘Bake it with love’ seemed like such painfully bland advice, for bland people, with bland lives. Disguising bitterness is a far greater skill than the simple act of adding sugar.

Why not bake it with passion? Vengeance? Fury? Maybe lust.

I doubted very much that every morning saw the housewives of the neighbourhood rubbing themselves suggestively amongst their doughs, whispering naïve nuggets of what they assumed to be erotic fiction through their clean oven doors, in their sterile, identical kitchens. It seemed unlikely any cheeky ‘additions’, romantic or otherwise, made it into those pastries, otherwise handcrafted to perfection. They were all marketing and no trousers, there is no baking romance: only lies.

They think they bake with love; I bake with a plan. Stirring in each nefarious detail, I plot the defeat of my enemies with each terminal crack of every doomed egg. As I sift the flour, the dusty snowfall covers silently, with a stealth so crafty it whispers their demise as it settles.

I do not want to bake, I never wanted to bake; they force me to. This will be their retribution.

***

I had four children in four separate classes. Such beautiful children! How blessed am I? Hashtag blessed, that’s what. Each class has two annual bake sales. I raise these children alone now (since someone began his habit tasting sweeter cake elsewhere) but even when there were two adults at home, I could not invent this imaginary baking time, and so, once, I tried to send the eldest with a cake bought from the local supermarket. The school’s fury was unparalleled in both written and personal confrontation; a letter was sent home suggesting I bring the next offering in the spirit of the school by baking it with love instead of buying it. The head of the PTA brought ‘the incident’ to my attention as I collected my mortified, and already disciplined, child, and we scuttled home with what felt like the curse of our lifetimes hanging over our heads. I could feel my own shame becoming her shame; my own devastating childhood being replicated down these same undecorated hallways. A corridor of horrified faces tutted their disbelief that we could have dared to commit such an atrocity, here, on school grounds, of all places. Ranks were closed and it was decreed such a thing must never happen again. All the playground mothers (even those with smiling faces next to mine in those tired old photographs in the box under the stairs) shunned the Cake of Shame, whilst whispering their evil gossip, and weaving their scandalised versions of events into our family history.

It came to pass that I found the time for the baking. I made the time, in places where there was not time to make. I would stay up, late into the night, determined to create something so spectacular that all the bitching school mums would be devastated by my skills, commitment and talents. I wanted them literally to have to eat their words. I created cakes, muffins, cookies, flapjacks, cupcakes, fairy cakes, sponges, pies, pastries and puddings. I loved to watch their eyes widen with disbelief at the ever-increasing size and complexity of my offerings. I lived my children’s lifetimes for every one of those next chances to reverse my rivals’ opinions of the cake-buying failure I felt nobody would ever forget.

As the years had drifted by, I heard the way their idle gossip changed; what had started as condescension eventually had turned to delight, but then, being impressed quickly turned to being hateful. The golden days of awe at my fantastical creations ended abruptly with a glorious four-hour baumkuchen; my impossibly beautiful cakes were no longer wonderful, they were ridiculed. Appreciation became envy, and with it, came their familiar ugliness and resentment. ‘She tries too hard’, they said, ‘she doesn’t bake them with love’. I was cast out, once more, and there was no cinnamon bun sticky enough to bring me back.

I had tried to do it right. I had tried to live their picket-fence life, in their tiny boxes, with all their rules set by tiny minds. My soul was in freefall from the moment I realised I would never escape the hamster wheel of school life. Every childhood burden had been carried by me into my adulthood, and handed back to my own children, in a series of desperate, pathetic, attempts to find acceptance here in this wretched schoolyard, cursed by generations of pointless competitors, impotent warfare, and the feeling of unending inadequacy. Here I was, still begging for appreciation from the very people who had first taught me I would never be enough.

***

It has been sixteen years of bake sales, and today, is my last sale of our final year.

In every sale, until today, every item I baked was swirled with resentment and rage. The grander the creation, the taller the cake, the more ornate the icing – all signposts to the true depth of my anger and hurt. For a while, it felt like righteous vengeance as I watched them fawning over my work, begging to consume it, arguing over the last slice for their husbands. Now it just seemed like so many years of effort, hardship, fruitless force, for nothing. So, today would be the final icing on the ultimate cake. The grandest design of all, a glimmering imposition upon this otherwise bland and forgettable landscape of humdrum surburban nothingness.

It was a chocolate cake: rich, moist, and the kind of thing you could have dreams about putting in your mouth… Quite the opposite of the usual PTA-recommended, single-serving homages to frigidity. This cake was going to slide inside them like nothing they had ever felt before. The icing alone would give them stirrings they would not believe they had been missing out on for all these years. One slice of this beauty and an end would come to all the stink-eye and hushed whispers at the school gates. I certainly baked it with something, and they were right, it was not love.

The cake’s chocolatey darkness was alluring in the same way as a cliff-edge: you want to know how it feels to go there, but you are bearing a very real risk. It bore a gloss more inviting than a siren’s song, and stood threateningly tall, glowering over the feeble donations scattered around it. It was my baked crowning glory, the total sum of the decades lost to subjugation and humiliation in this hideous prison of ritual conformity.

I wanted to reach inside that cake and throw enormous chunks of it at their perfectly immutable expressions, I wanted to lose endless crumbs in their never-grey hair, and I wanted to force feed them huge hunks of it until it made them vomit with my own pain. I wanted this cake to destroy them from the inside out.

Instead, I smiled the smile I had purposefully learned for this exact role: ‘You would never guess it’s low-cal, am I right, ladies?’

One by one, they all took a slice of my chocolate cake, like slender robot clones, delighted to be given permission in this way to consume something so wanton, so frivolous, and so forbidden.

Inside, I could barely contain the thrilled screaming that this, finally, was my victory. They had all eaten it! I had won, in the final hour. Of course, it could never have been a low-calorie recipe, idiots.

Not with that quantity of poison in it, anyway.

***

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