Never Deny The Cake

If there were ever any doubt about the provenance of my son, there would be no requirement for a DNA test. Apart from the fact that he looks EXACTLY like his father except that he is 2, blond and cannot (as yet) curl his eyebrows; he is addicted to cake.

Let me put this into perspective for you. The frog, for all his civilisation and niceties is only French by birth. And accent. And family. And... oh for godsakes. Anyway, he's not what you would call 'into' food, he just wants it to arrive quickly. Yes yes, I realise there may be thousands, indeed millions of French people who don't particularly care for food, although I have to say I've only met the one. He would have lived out of boxes and packets forever if I hadn't coaxed him into accepting home-cooked meals and I did this by introducing home-baked cakes to our lives. And, since they are so ridiculously easy to make, cakes started appearing on a fairly regular basis.

I did, on becoming pregnant, decide blindly that my child would have no processed sugar for at least a year and we did fairly well until around 18 months old he went through a difficult period of teething which his father, under the excuse that "It's the French Way", alleviated via the medium of cakes, biscuits and chocolate milk. 'Bissik' is in fact one of the spud's earlier words with 'cake' added at his second birthday. Since then, he's been an unstoppable cake-a-holic like his Father and the only way I've been able to limit his access to the stuff is to not bake any; however since this equates to 'I don't love you anymore' in frogland, this has been a little fraught.

Last weekend being Valentines, I did attempt an ironic nod by buying some heart-shaped cookie cutters. However, the spud had a particularly large poo just at the critical point and the resulting biscuits were comedy black hearts by the time I actually got them out of the oven. This clearly meant stronger measures and so... I baked a cake. A big one. With icing. And chocolate hearts. And EVERYthing.

My dear sweet darling frog then decided, one morning while Charlie was resisting his shreddies, that a piece of cake would be better than nothing and so there was my 2 year old son, sitting on the sofa eating cream cake at 9 in the morning. God almighty, just call Jamie Oliver and have me shot.

Since then it's been bad. Very bad. Until the cake was gone, the spud was trying every ruse in his little book to get up to the counter and at the thing. He begged, he pleaded, he pretended to be interested in the kettle, he lay on the floor squirming and screaming 'Caaaaake!!! Caaaaaaaake!!!; he batted his eyelashes and demanded hugs and kisses and then added 'and cake please Mummy?' in a hopeful little squeaky voice.

I picked him up at nursery and as his key-worker trawled through his day she said 'and he and his friend played in the kitchen and pretended to make a cake' and when I asked him (as usual) what he did in nursery, rather than ignoring me and pointing at a bus he said 'Cake!' and didn't stop saying it until bedtime.

Perhaps this is why he's been ignoring me for the past few days: I have Denied The Cake.