Gabi Lardies attempts the most feared bake of all from The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. 

“Bitch of a cake. Don’t make it unless you’re really desperate,” said Pamela Clark, author of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. “Don’t go there. Glue the pages together. Forget it!” That was her advice in 2016, and again last Saturday. But who is an Australian to tell us New Zealanders what not to make from our most beloved childhood book? I might not be a baker, but I am a patriot.

The Tip Truck Cake, found on page 88 of Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, looks like a perfectly reasonable request. Two cakes baked in rectangular loaf tins, lined up and sculpted into a cab and a tipped tray, smeared in avocado green icing and accessorised with chocolate biscuits, pebbles, liquorice, tinfoil and candy. It’s no Sistine Chapel, so it seems my duty as a citizen to give it a go. 

The preparation

The trouble starts early. I do not own a single loaf tin, let alone two. All my ovenware is round apart from the (washed) aluminium tray of a frozen lasagne I had a few weeks ago. 

Neither of my local op shops have loaf tins – they must have got snapped up by local MILFs in the area with the same brainwave as me. I try Geoff’s Emporium, which has a truck shaped cake tin for only $6.25. Heartbreakingly, I know this would be cheating.

At bloody Countdown, the loaf tins are $14.99, and that is simply too much since I have blown my budget (please become a Spinoff member!) on M&Ms. It’s going to have to be the lasagne tray. Look, New Zealanders are nothing if not resourceful, number 8 wire, grumble grumble 4×2, grumble grumble, she’ll be right!

Countdown attempts to swindle me again by offering two packets of biscuits for $5. I’ve been burned before, so I check the single item price – it’s $2.60. Right then and there I decide I will find another solution to the chocolate fingers in the recipe, grabbing only the choccy mint wheels.

Pamela wants me to buy egg-yellow, blue, and green (specifically not leaf green) food colouring, but I’ve read ahead and I know she mixes them together to make… green. I save $3.40 buying only green (and not to worry, not a leaf in sight). Like so many cakes in the book, the finishing touches of the tip truck require strips of liquorice. The rancid smell of these is burned into my childhood memories, as it clings to the icing even after you’ve picked the culprit off. I simply can’t buy it, not even for appearance’s sake.

I also need eight empty matchboxes. On my quest through the labyrinthine aisles, I begin to question if they still exist. When was the last time I saw a matchbox? Five years ago? Ten years ago? They’re standing bright red next to the gardening stuff, with the same stripy beehive they’ve always had. It’s comforting to know matches haven’t had a bougie modernist rebrand.

Most importantly, the recipe calls for two packets of butter cake mix. Butter cake – boring!!!! Two packets? We’re only making one cake! One packet of chocolate cake mix goes into my basket. On the way home, I feel like an idiot for not getting the gluten free option (it’s just something that happens once you’re over 30, real cake hurts).

Making the cake

I am so happy with my nasty little box cake. The last cake I made was as flat as a pancake and it didn’t even taste good because I didn’t put as much sugar as the recipe said. I attempted to cover up its flatness with flowers from the garden but, unfortunately, they had ants on them.

Now it’s just the mysterious powder in the bag, two eggs, butter and ⅔ cup of dated almond milk from Why Knot Outlet Shop, which has little lumps and tastes weird. They want me to use my electric blender on high for three minutes, but it’s currently experiencing technical difficulties after blending pumpkin soup last week. I whisk with my Minnie Mouse mini whisk till my arm hurts. It’s looking great – smooth, chocolatey and sticky. 

I pour half the mixture in the baking tray. Admittedly it’s a measly portion but cakes grow, right? The whole point of baking is that it rises into a lovely fluffy thing with heaps of tiny air bubbles which more than double its volume, right? In 30 minutes we will see.

In the meantime, I move onto emptying the match boxes. There are 45 in each box, so I’m left with a pile of 360 surplus matches. Did she want me to start a forest fire? Unlikely to work given all the rain. The only thing I can think to do with them is tape them all together and make a mega match to burn safely outside on the driveway.

I cover all eight match boxes with tinfoil and realise I definitely could have left the matches inside, because no doubt tomorrow I’ll be unwrapping these boxes and putting them back in, so they can live at the back of the cupboard for the next 20 years. I wish I’d been more discerning.

The first loaf is ready. It’s grown, but when I remove it from the lasagne tray, it’s not a defined cuboid – the growing and the baking paper has softened all the edges. It looks like a log. Also, it feels very tender and soft, like a pile of lint, and not at all like it’s going to have the structural integrity to be part of a tip truck.

Part two of the cake goes into the oven. Baking is hard work so I sneak a choccy mint, and I consider the liquorice problem. Obviously it’s gross and doesn’t have a place on my tip truck. But I do concede its dark lines elevate the cake and define its form. I need something long and thin, I open my pantry door, and there’s my answer – noodles! But we don’t want them anaemic and pale. I open the other pantry door, and there’s red food colouring from a cake I made two years ago. Perfect.

Log two is done – it’s time to sculpt. The words are confusing. Barely instructions, they rely on delegating to three little images of cut up cakes and saying “as shown” a lot. The “what ifs” begin to creep in – what if the truck doesn’t have to tip? What if the tip tray is just cardboard? What if it’s actually a car?

As I carve off the edges and wonky bits of my logs, half the cake becomes offcuts (or rather, scraps for Mum). Is this the real purpose of cake art? To eat cake without guilt and before everybody else? I place my blocks on my shiny matchboxes, which seem to serve as ice skates on the baking paper. All in all, I think it’s going pretty well.

While making the icing, I find a use for one of the matches (359 to go). I dip it into the food colouring, then the icing, to add green at a safe pace, since we all know that shit is concentrated. When it’s a lurid green, I’m happy.

I’ve got my Mickey Mouse spatula out for a smooth application. I’m wearing my apron and I’ve washed my hands and I think, damn, my five readers are gonna be impressed. When the soft green makes contact with the soft brown, it all starts crumbling. Because of all my carving, my tip truck lacks any surface which isn’t crumbs just waiting for their excuse to fall off (as shown). 

The book mentions none of these problems, and in the photo the icing looks well adhered and crumb-free. The icing is my worst enemy. It looks like Shrek jizz. My dreams of grandeur are gone. 

I endure, adding the M&Ms and the red noodles. The truck is a bit small for eight wheels, so I slap on six. When making the radio antenna, I find another use for a matchstick (358 to go). It’s 3pm, and this wonky cursed cake is all I have to show for my entire day.

The kitchen and lounge are a mess. I’ve cut up my cereal box and I’ve got a headache from eating most of the icing. I begin to question my life (story) choices. The fact that Dame Jacinda had to prop up her piano cake with a can of lentils does little to soothe my broken heart. 

Pamela Clark was right: this is a bitch of a cake. My advice? Glue these pages together.

Dinner at her favourite restaurant landed Beth Brash in A&E, where the doctor’s orders were to head straight to the dairy to source an unlikely remedy.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right? Well, life gave me lemons but it turns out it was Coke on the menu. 

What unfolded at one of my favourite Wellington restaurants, KC Cafe, last Friday is a saga so bizarre it needed sharing. 

So there I am about to order my favourite dish, eggplant claypot (which – I feel for the story it’s worth mentioning – is so soft you could almost eat through a straw), but due to the influence of the brilliant @KC_Review on Instagram, I thought I would branch out and try something new. @KC_Review gave the Xinjiang chicken with fresh chilli and ginger a 7 out of 10, which in hindsight is just an OK rating from them (for reference, the eggplant claypot gets a 9), but as they point out, “it looks awesome” – and it really did.

When I ordered it the two women at the counter both stopped what they were doing and piped up with questions of concern: “Have you had this dish before?”, “Can you handle spicy foods?”, “Are you OK with bones?” I brushed these all off with the nonchalance of a seasoned intrepid eater, almost using the line of questioning as a badge of honour, but this smug eater ran towards those red flags like they were bunting. 

My first bite of the chicken was delicious. I hadn’t tried it before but was glad I did. Oh wow, it was spicy – they had warned me, I guess – so with eyes streaming and stifling a cough, I swallowed. As it wedged itself into my oesophagus I thought, “Oh yes, there are the bones they talked about”, which quickly moved to, “Well, this is going to be embarrassing”. When you’re known for writing about food and running food events in the city, dying at one of your favourite restaurants would probably make the news. Oh well, at least they could say “she died doing what she loved”. 

Finally swallowing the chicken and my pride, the bone made its presence known in every centimetre of my throat and for the rest of the weekend. It wasn’t until Monday morning that I realised the pain hadn’t really subsided and so called Healthline. After a brief questionnaire, I was told to go to the accident and urgent care clinic immediately. 

There I was assessed, X-rayed and then brought into a room. Going through all the worst case scenarios, I thought the next stage would involve some sort of device down my throat. But the doctor assured me the bone was small, not a huge cause of concern and the pain was mostly from the scratch it had caused. The official medical advice and “after care” was something I did not expect. Neither did the doctor, who said, “I can’t believe I’m telling you to do this, but the ENT has said that drinking four cans of full-sugar Coke should help soften and dislodge the bone.” We both giggled at the absurdity of it; we also giggled and she apologised for having to write down “foreign object in orifice” which now, horrifyingly, is on my permanent medical record.

So off I trot, down to the Night & Day. Three cans of 440ml Coke were on special for $10, the exact prescribed amount but in a different dosage. Did they know I was coming, is this a common prescription? Is ThiS a BiG PhaRMa & CocA-COla AmaTiL CoNSpiRacY? 

This would be the most Coke I’d ever had in one sitting. I had flashbacks to growing up with a science teacher as a mother and doing this very experiment. We would put a chicken bone in a glass of Coke and after some time the bone became rubbery. It thrilled me as a child, but could this also explain why I’d never had four cans of Coke in one sitting? Parents take note. 

Turns out Coke is often used as medical-grade, human-safe Drano for the oesophagus. After I was jacked up on Coke and felt the need to share my experience on Instagram, plenty of medical staff responded with their stories of using Coke in the hospital. As well as dissolving and dislodging bones, it’s also used to clear blocked feeding tubes in situ. Someone else was advised by their doctor to drink a can of full-sugar Coke a day on their trip to Vietnam – “kills any bugs, he reckoned”. It worked, apparently. Other uses were to clean “blood off the highway” by first responders, and cleaning toilets and coins if you feel the need. Not to mention marinating meats, but I guess if we see what it does to bone, a bit of gristle is a walk in the park for this atomic bomb for the gut. 

I am thrilled to say it worked. The next day was noticeably better and by the one after I was back to normal. I am grateful for ACC, as it would be awkward to have to sue one of your favourite restaurants. Life lessons are: continue to try something new, but listen to the experts. And, if you’re downing a few cans a day of the good stuff, then maybe it’s time to give up the Coke habit.