Black

One of my running friends is doing her 100th parkrun tomorrow – that’s two years’ worth of parkrun!

Her running buddy’s daughter is making cakes to celebrate. I’d already decided I’d make some fairy cakes to celebrate, but I kept shtum on Thursday when they were talking about it because I wanted it to be a surprise.

My big idea was to make fairy cakes using the bake setting of the air fryer. What an aforementioned disaster.

The problem was that I was so busy remembering to reduce the cooking time by 25% and doing sums that I forgot to reduce the cooking time from the time it takes to bake a big cake to the time it takes to cook a fairy cake.

Today, I tried again. I used a lower temperature and looked in on them every five minutes. They didn’t self-level as I’d expect in a conventional oven, so they look more like rock cakes.

I planned to ice them with white icing, then pipe 100 on them in black. Black is the colour of the merchandise for the 100-parkruns milestone. Then I thought it was probably best to pipe white icing in case the black stained the piping bag. Then I realised I didn’t have a piping bag with a small enough nozzle. Probably just as well because I’m not great at piping.

I iced them with glacé icing coloured with black food colouring that arrived today, thinking they would maybe do – until I had another great idea: I could make a stencil of 100, hold it over each cake, then sprinkle icing sugar on them.

I made a stencil using a letter I was happily ignoring, a pencil, a ruler and a pair of nail scissors. I outlined a rough circle, then marked out the numbers. Since these numbers can have a line of symmetry across the middle, I folded the paper in half and cut out the 1. That was easy. Then came the zeroes.

It took a while to work out how to cut them so the middle bit would stay in; I used my superpowers to work it out. When I unfolded the paper, it said 100. I was relieved. Time to get sprinkling.

It might have been a good idea if the surface had been even, but it wasn’t, so it wasn’t.

Mr Pandammonium suggested sticking a flag in one of them to say what they were for. So I got my creative skills out again, and made a flag with the back of an envelope that has an unfortunate blue pattern on the reverse, a cocktail stick and a marker pen.

They look a sight, but the Messrs P enjoyed the taste test.