Favourite Places

Like a gazillion other teenagers my daughter has a slight obsession with You Tube Vloggers.  In case you didn’t realise blogging is old hat .... this is my second blog post and I’m already out of touch!  Today’s teenage girls don’t follow the Bay City Rollers’ every move via Jackie magazine, they are not waiting for the David Essex fan club magazine to land on the mat, they are not even going dizzy with excitement because it’s Top of the Pops day...... no, they have momentary bursts of energy, just enough to run up to their rooms after school, because one of their favourite You-Tubers has uploaded a new vlog!  (If you are not in the know, this is a Video Blog).   

It is easy for those of us who grew up in the pre-internet age to diss this, but I suspect we are always wary of things that we don’t understand, or haven’t experienced.  I have tried very hard to see the attraction, and generally I do now.  My preoccupation was with what David Essex liked to eat for breakfast or what his favourite dog breed was....this did nothing to add to my worldliness...in fact now I think about it, there was precious little in our pre-internet world that prepared us for the world around us.  Even though I loved Enid Blyton's tales from Mallory Towers, the antics of the lacrosse team at a girls’ boarding school were not reality.  These harmless vlogs open up a whole world to our teenage children, a world they can explore from their bedrooms.  My daughter has learned about cooking, nutrition, skincare, hair, make-up, health, hygiene, relationships, anti-bullying messages and much much more.  She knows way more about everything than I did at her age.  She will not be launched into the World with the same, sometimes embarrassing, naivety that I was.   

Now, I have digressed.  I meant to be telling you about my daughter’s birthday cake!  She is celebrating her 14^th Birthday. Ask any other cake maker and you’ll realise just what a challenge it is to find a theme for a teenager’s birthday.   She is ‘so over’ birthday cakes with pink frills and a princess theme.  Quite frankly, the cake would be ‘sick’ if it was plain black.  As an aside, how and why did ‘great’ become ‘sick’?  

I finally settled on making her a cake based on her favourite place.....her bed.  I know this is not an artistic first, Tracey Emin took that prize with her bed.   I’m trying to remember back to my 14 year-old self, in an attempt to establish whether my bed(room) was also my favourite place....and I think it was.  I certainly spent a lot of time there, very occasionally I tidied it up, but usually I didn’t.  Just like my daughter I professed to liking it messy, but really I loved when it was freshly tidied, yet I couldn’t bring myself to keep it that way either. 

In fact Gaby's bedroom is so small that it is just the width of her bed, so I could almost make a cake representation of her whole room on a 14” cake board.    She loves her cosy little world, surrounded by everything that’s important to her, happily shoe-horning herself in between the dog and two cats, who quite like her world too!

These vloggers do seem to be missing a trick though.  Posters!  Big posters! My bedroom was covered with posters of my  heart-throb.... huge pictures of David Essex gazing at me from every angle, the staple holes across his nose, and sharp creases down each side of his face, didn't detract from his appeal, and certainly did wonders to cover up the pink floral Sanderson wallpaper that was all the rage in the 1970's.  Fortunately my daughter is a very talented artist, so she creates her own pictures to decorate her room with, or perhaps to liven up the bland white walls, all the rage in the 2010s!!   So when making her cake, her wall and these very important ,and treasured works of art, had to be featured.

The chosen ones, the ones worthy of a pencil recreation are Zoella, Joe Sugg (aka Thatcher Joe), Alfie Deyes and Marcus Butler.  And here they are... aren’t they fantastic?

And so the theme of the cake was decided.... her bed was recreated with cake and sugarpaste.  Every little (untidy) detail!  Chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream and chocolate sugarpaste lie underneath. 

I hope you like it. Her verdict ......"that's totally brilliant, but where's my wardrobe?"

 

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to Surrey Edible Images for producing the edible imaging for me.