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Dear Mum and Dad,
Before I say anything else, let me say that this whole incident was Lydia's fault!!! Well, it was! If she hadn't given us that secret assignment, the strange sequence of events that lead up to this moment would never had happened in the first place.
It all started at the beginning. You know how good William's cakes are. They're like the most delectable foods ever baked. But we couldn't let him bake his own birthday cake. That's not fair at all!
So the assignment was simple. We'd sneak back into the house during our free period and bake a cake for him and it would be waiting for him when he got home from school. It would be a miraculous surprise for everyone involved and there would be yummy cake tonight. There was no way this could possibly go wrong.
Lydia found a great recipe on the web for a flourless torte that only took 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes! I'd be back at school way before Maths. And it said that all you needed to do was be able to push a button. Clearly this recipe knew us well.
And yet, it didn't know us at all!!
It didn't help that Lydia couldn't escape school to help and that Cass was off because she didn't feel well. But I knew I could do it on my own. I had a list of ingredients to buy, given to me by Lydia with the assignment, and I bought every single one of the items on the list. Except I couldn't find Amaretti biscuits, so I substituted Tim Tams. Everything's better with more chocolate.
To start with it said to preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Our oven doesn't even go up that high. I turned up as far as it would go and hoped that would suffice. How do people bake such astonishing cakes if the equipment doesn't even have the right settings? At least the food processor had a pulse button like the recipe said.
Also, I don't know how they can call it a flourless cake when I was told to flour the pan after I'd buttered it. That's why the kitchen is all covered in flour, by the way. I tried to clean it up but I didn't have much time. But more about that later.
It took an eternity for the food processor to grind the almonds and Tim Tams. I blame the chocolate coating on the Tim Tams. Who knew chocolate could make things more difficult? Maybe I should have tried to remove it before dumping the biscuits in, but I'm not sure how I could have.
As for the stuff on the ceiling - I just couldn't reach it. I must not have put the cover back on the food processor securely when I added the eggs and when I pressed the button, WHOOSH!! I stopped it almost instantaneously, though and fixed the cover.
I also forgot to cover the chocolate chips when I melted them in the microwave. But I combined what was left of my ingredients and it seemed all right, though I'd lost more than I'd thought and it barely covered the bottom of the pan.
That was when I read the next instruction and discovered the cake had to cook for thirty whole minutes. So not only was this recipe not flourless, it took much longer than fifteen minutes to make. Why couldn't they have called it a Forty-five Minute Almost Flourless Chocolate Amaretti Cake? Though this was actually a Forty-five Minute Almost Flourless Chocolate Tim Tam Cake, so I shouldn't throw stones here.
I did read the recipe straight through when I was done, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything and mirable dictu I noticed the little F by the temperature setting for the oven. ACK!!!!!!!!!!! The cake would have burnt to a crisp. A quick text to Lydia and soon I was turning the oven down to a more reasonable 175C. While the oven cooled down a little, I tried to clean up the kitchen as best as I could. I did get the egg I'd dropped on the floor and the melted chocolate that coated the outside of the food processor when I poured it in and my hand slipped.
I finally put it in the oven half an hour after I'd started. I couldn't go back to school then, even though we had Double Maths, because I was afraid the house would burn down if I left. You do understand, don't you??? I only stayed home to look after your property. Not because I wanted to miss school.
I even found the mop and tried to mop the ceiling but all that did was spread it out thinner. After that I had an ideology and climbed on to the table (I did take my shoes off first) and tried to reach it with a wet sponge. All that got me was a shower of dirty chocolate water. Maybe we could just paint it brown and be done with it? I never thought I'd be calling chocolate dirty>, either.
So the cake was in the oven, safely baking at the correct temperature and I went up to wash my hair before it became completely unmanageable. And then I noticed what a complete and utter disaster my clothes were - all over chocolate and egg and almonds, so I took a long hot shower to recover from my strenuous undertaking.
The timer must have beeped while I was in the shower, because by the time I got back downstairs, Mum and William were in the kitchen staring in pure astonishment at the smoking cake pan in William's pot-holder-bedecked hand.
You know the rest of it, but you do comply that it's not my fault. All I wanted to do was do something nice for William's birthday. I never meant to leave the kitchen unusable or burn the cake. It just happened!
And now I've got to spend an eternity scrubbing the kitchen spotless. You could at least commit my sentence long enough so that I could go to the restaurant with you. Do you want me to starve?
I should have let William bake his own cake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But, at least I completed the assignment. You have to give me credit for that.
Your adored (and adoring) daughter,
Emily