Now, about that cake

In a minute.

Amy decided she had a sore neck when we arrived at kindy. Since she had been totally normal all morning, this was a cause for suspicion, so I asked her outright if she was afraid of those boys who push and kick her. She said No, and insisted her neck - no throat - was sore. We went inside, but she got worse and worse as we headed towards her room. She was very withdrawn and moody, and I decided, well, kindy is not compulsory so why push it? Let's take her home and get to the bottom of this.

I had to go to the dentist, so she came along, and it was in the car on the way that she started to describe feeling shy, and no-one will let her play, and she is having trouble saying 'kashite' (pass me) when playing with the other kids. And the boys...So I extracted a promise that she would go the following morning, because she would not make friends if she did not go! And I told her that in time, all the kids would come to love her and be her friend, cos she is such a wonderful girl, why wouldn't they?

And so she played happily with the toys in the dentist's waiting room while I submitted to more mysterious treatments in the chair. The oddest thing was thing purple gun, some kind of new anesthetic. Not the needle, not the topical anaesthetic the NZ dentist used on me to top-up the waning injected anesthetic, but something else. He put in a little ball of cotton first, I don't know if that had some anesthetic on it, maybe. Then got this gun, and irradiated me for several minutes (it honestly looked like a laser gun from a 1960's sci-fi tv series, maybe Lost in Space). I could feel the gum slowly going numb, but none of the awful shooting nerve-death of the injection, and NO NUMB MOUTH! Yay! I can have lunch! And a cup of tea! And no pain! Now they just need to invent a purple ray gun for childbirth that takes away the pain without paralyzing half your body.

Back to the cake. I used store-bought roll sponges, which I think was a mistake. They were so light and fluffly that they collapsed onto themselves, especially with the addition of icing and lollies. Luckily for me, two pretty fairies flew in the window and helped hold the houses up, I don't know what I would have done without them. The tall pink house was iced and on the board while I was working on the tall purple house on a separate plate. The pink house had sagged already a few times, but I thought it was because I had cut the bottom crooked so I kept shoring it up with bits of sponge under one side, like the leaning tower of Pisa. Then Amy came in and noticed that it had completely fallen over, and while I was fixing it up, the purple cake actually toppled off the plate and went splat on the floor, and kind of flattened with the impact, which is why it is a bit oddly shaped.

Originally, I was going to have the two paths leading to the fairies, but since the were needed to hold up the houses, I hit upon the idea of making a 7th tiny cake just to hold the candles, which I did, using cut-offs from the houses.

The conical roofs are muffins, and the round ones are sponge rolls with the top layer removed. The doors and the bars on the windows are made of gum, and the windows are made of jelly lollies. The blue-and-pink stuff on the medium-sized purple house is actually candy floss, but it shrank. Japanese pocky chocolate sticks make up one roof and the path border, and coffee biscuits with the cookie part painstakingly removed make the roof of the tall pink house. The pink, white and green roof of the tall purple house are actually Japanese Dolls' Festival sweets. The grass is coconut dyed with green food colouring.