Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows that I have one important tradition every year for my husband’s birthday.
I devise a new meat cake for him.
I cannot take credit for the original idea. The credit for that must go to my husband himself, who should be admired for his unfailing dedication to the art of creatively consuming the flesh of dead animals.
One glance at the internet will tell you that meat cakes are all the rage now, but I’m not going to be that wanker who is all like, “I was making meat cake before Pete Evans went full-paleo and started spruiking breakfast smoothies made from possum entrails”.
No.
I am TOTALLY going to be that wanker who says “I fucking INVENTED meat cake, well before Pete Evans ever THOUGHT ABOUT stealing his recipe ideas from the fossilised shit of dead cavemen”.
(Sorry Pete Evans. Not sure why you became the stooge for that gag but I picked it up and ran with it. We good, yeah? Pass the entrails).
2013: Chicken Schnitzel Cake
My adventures in meat began several years ago, with the humble Chicken Schnitzel Cake. My husband had been nagging asking me to bake one for years, and to shut him up make him happy I decided to deliver on this long-held dream for his 40th birthday.
This was the result. Naïve and clumsy, but it had potential.
With the bar set impossibly high, the challenge was to come up with a new and more elaborate spin on the meat cake genre every year.
2014: Rainbow Chicken Schnitzel Cake
The following year saw the Rainbow Chicken Schnitzel Cake.
I wish there was a heart-warming story behind this cake, but the reality is that I got so sick of seeing rainbow cake humblebrags in my newsfeed every. other. fucking. day that I came up with this as an immature “fuck you” to everyone who made me feel inferior about my crappy baking fails (yes, they are all listed here in one handy blog post).
My Rainbow Chicken Schnitzel Cake looked like this, and contained the kind of mind-altering levels of artificial food colouring that would make a peyote trip feel like a mid-week stroll through the freezer section at Coles.
It was not fit for human consumption. My husband ate it anyway.
2015: Meatball Croquembouche
I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that the Meatball Croquembouche is the single greatest thing I will ever accomplish (sorry kids), and that my entire life is destined to become a downward spiral of mediocrity from here on in.
I could live to 123 years of age and people will still be talking about the fact that I invented the Meatball Croquembouche, not that I managed to outlive Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified person on record.
C’est foutu! It is the monkey on my back and the wind beneath my wings.
2016: Shepherd’s Pie Swimming Pool Cake
This year I had a moment of drunken insight and decided to put my own meaty spin on that well-loved Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book favourite – the swimming pool cake.
** GAG ALERT ** They kind of look like this.
For the record, I HATE the swimming pool cake.
I truly LOATHE it, because it features a bile-gargling combination of two of the most hideous non-food stuffs in the entire world: gloopy blue jelly and rubbery plastic dolls with tangled manes of disgusting synthetic hair.
One glance at a swimming pool cake immediately inspires a mouthful of hot vomit, and given the choice I would much prefer to scull a yard glass of my own upchuck than eat a plateful of sloppy blue gunk with a decapitated Barbie doll head in it.
GROSS.
Keep that fucking shit away from me.
For the record, I’m not someone who is precious about artificial crap in my food – I will happily deep-throat a hot dog like it’s nobody’s business – but there is something about the swimming pool cake that repulses me even more than the thought of Donald Trump in an actual pool with his presidential man boobs tucked into a bright green mankini.
But this is not about me. I had to put my deep churning revulsion aside in order to make meat cake magic for my husband, and so I did…
How to Make Shepherd’s Pie Swimming Pool Cake
1.. Bake mince in round cake tin.
2. Mash the potatoes (do it gently and apologise for what you are about to do).
3. Add food colouring until you have a delightful shade of “Toilet Duck Blue”.
3. Ice the meat cake with mashed potato.
3. Construct fence from mini-franks.
4. Top with disgusting plastic toys.
5. Suppress urge to gag.
6. Serve warm.
7. Enjoy!
(Oh, and you see all those black dots on my benchtop in the last picture? They’re fucking burn marks. Pro tip, meat cakers: Don’t light fucking sparklers on your laminate benchtop)
****
Oh, and for the record – yes, he ate it.
HE FUCKING ATE IT.
Not only did he eat it… He loved it…
Bring on 2017.
