Esther Steward

Ingredients: Sugar, eggs, flour, margarine, baking powder, espresso coffee, icing sugar, supercook jelly diamonds, fiddes payne white chocolate drops, chocolate chews.

This is just a cake. With icing and sweets. But I would also like to offer an interpretation of how my cake could represent motherhood. I fear pretentiousness, but here goes! On the top are the sweets and icing, to signify the richly patterned experience of life with young children. It's a mixture of the sophisticated adult coffee taste and the childish jelly sweets, arranged in an ever-growing child-like pattern. Just as the children grow, so does the pattern, the adult icing supporting the sweeties. I had intended the middle to be more decorative, and more chaotic, but prosaically the icing set too hard, too quickly. The plain, bare and cut cake edges around the outside suggest the everyday hard work, self-sacrifice even, which holds everything together. There is no treat without the base, no fun without the cleaning, cooking, laundry and other mundane tasks.

The flavour? After many months of sleepness nights, it just had to be a coffee cake. So what I offer 88cakes is something that is not perfect, but is my best effort - just like my life as a mother.

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