Is That A Doughnut or A Meringue?

Should you find yourself over the next week or so listening to the Bing Crosby yuletide classic, It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, consider this:

“There’s a tree in the Grand Hotel,
One in the Park as well
The Sturdy kind that doesn’t mind
The Snow…”

Of course it doesn’t mind the snow, it’s a flippin’ Christmas tree! What kind of Christmas tree is it which minds the snow? You can imagine the scene in the forest in the middle of Norway. The snow starts, the trees suddenly go into a panic and start running about in a torment of fear and pusillanimity. ‘Quick men!’ shouts the leader, ‘get the women and children inside. Last one in the sauna’s deciduous!’

A week to go until Christmas. School finished on Friday, which seems very early. I, of course, seem to remember school finishing on like the 24th at eight in the evening, or thereabouts, but I expect my mother remembers it differently. There’s another line in the above song, ‘And Mum and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again…’ which has a depth of perception sadly lacking in the ridiculous mince about the outrageously brave tree in the park. I remember when TPCKAM first heard that line, she thought it sounded mean, but I don’t think she does anymore.

The past week has seen the usual torrent of parties and baking and driving the kids all over the city. I had to do two bouts in the kitchen. First was nothing to do with the kids, but was as a result of having to make mince pies for the International Women’s Christmas bazaar. Every spouse in the embassy was asked to make three or four million mince pies, and they still sold out apparently.

I rose early on the Saturday morning, donned my chef’s hat and got to work. Given that I was using pastry out of a packet and mincemeat out of a jar, there wasn’t actually any real skill involved, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t about to make a mess of it. Assembling a mince pie so that it looks like something you might buy in a shop is the kind of thing they used to do on the Generation Game. I would have been rubbish on that show, and so it proved with the mince pies. They looked, well, mince. When I put them in the oven the time on the digital clock read 9:11, a grim portent of how the mince pies would be destined to turn out.

Four days earlier I had sat in amongst the nest of vipers that is a collective of international mums, as they decided who would make what for Two of Two’s class Christmas party. By the time it got to me, sandwiches, crisps and paper plates had already been taken. I blurted out mini pavlovas for some reason, and then sat back and forgot about it for a few days.

Now, the essence of the pavlova, the meringue, I could have made days in advance. I didn’t. I left it, in fact, until the morning of the party. I rose early – 5:10am – in order to have the meringues cooked and cooling in the oven before I’d headed off to school to deposit the spawn. I addressed the kitchen at 5:15. Separated the egg whites, measured out the sugar. For some reason I thought our electric whisk wasn’t working. I don’t know why I thought that. I didn’t even check it. I think maybe some previous electric whisk burnt out, but that was about four years ago and has long since been replaced by a whisk which is fully operational. It was just after five in the morning, and there must have been some weird psychological dream-like throwback going on. So, lacking an electric whisk – and using the kind of brain-dead thought processing which would guarantee me a job in the senior Civil Service if I wanted it – I decided to go for the electric handheld blender. To be honest, I thought it was a handheld whisk. Electric blenders don’t whisk eggs. It didn’t work. I got out the industrial blender, and fitted the blender attachment rather than the whisk attachment. That didn’t work either. At some point I think I even tried in desperation to whisk it by hand, which was very early-19th century and destined to failure

At this stage I still didn’t realise that I was being a complete muppet. I blamed the eggs, binned them, and cracked open another four. I did exactly the same series of mindless acts of culinary ineptitude. It’s one thing to be idiotic, but to repeat the idiocy twice with a ninety minute period takes a special level of naïve muppetry. The second batch of eggs also refused to be whisked by a series of blenders. I stomped up the stairs in a humph, not too far off seven o’clock. TPCKAM stirred from under the covers. I reported my Morning So Far. To give her some credit, she didn’t laugh at me, she just said, ‘Why didn’t you use the whisk?’

I went back down the stairs and re-entered the battlefield. The whisk was working. I had the meringues in the oven in ten minutes. Basically I had got out of bed, at just after five in the morning, to be stupid. Days don’t start any better than that.

And you know, I don’t reckon that six year-old kids really appreciate a nice bit of pavlova. It’s just something else with a tonne of sugar in it.

So here we are a week before Christmas. Only seventeen days until the kids go back to school…although to be honest I’m not yet at Bing’s stage of not being able to wait for it. The kids have cricket fever at the moment, prompted by my watching it every morning, rather than any actual interest in the England team getting gubbed. This morning they were out in the garden at eight o’clock, temperature just above freezing, barely daylight, a dreich, bleak, damp day, big jackets and wellies, Two of Two in a balaclava, playing the summer game. Having played out there all weekend, I know that the pitch is a little slow and the ball is turning square. Heartwarming enthusiasm from the pair of them. Ten minutes later they were screaming at each other, One of Two ran into the house bringing the garden with her, and I watched from the stands as Two of Two picked up four stumps and the bat and hurled them across the pitch, his face contorted in little boy anger.

Scotland needs a Dennis Lillee.