Cake or Death?

Hamish Blake thought he was doing something nice for his kids. Instead, he started a national cake-pocalypse.

I am in my kitchen watching an ant march along the bench. It travels up the side of the Big Chop chopping board. The Big Chop is so heavy that it is often rendered unusable. It must feel mountainous to the ant. I feel nauseous and heavy and my brain feels thick and I wonder whether it’s because of the upcoming deadline or because I’ve eaten seven failed fondant-based racing car chassis’. I consider where the ant came from and if it’s in my house for the first time ever or if it’s travelling back to its nest to tell the other ants about the blue fondant.

Today is cake day.

Each year since my first child turned two, I have fallen into the cake trap. It is a phenomenon that began with a man called Hamish Blake eight years ago and has had consequences that can only be compared with the creation of the atomic bomb, but in a domestic setting. In the famous words of Eddie Izzard, Cake or Death?

“I am become Cake, destroyer of household peace.”

Incredibly famous in Australia and New Zealand, Hamish Blake started his career in comedy before becoming a radio and television star. He went on to marry Australia’s sweetheart, a journalist and author called Zoe Foster Blake who sold her wildly successful skincare business, rendering her a gazillionaire (she later bought it back for ¼ of the price). Rather than retiring and enjoying his wife’s hard-earned dosh, Hamish continues his work as a comedian, podcaster, presenter of Lego Masters, voice of various characters in Bluey, and literal Father of the Year.

Clearly, we should hate these people. Kind, beautiful, interesting AND successful? Gross. But if there’s one thing that particularly grinds my gears about these guys, it’s the cake thing.

Hamish and Zoe have two children. When their eldest child, Sonny, was three, he asked for a very specific cake. It was to represent a character from the movie ‘Cars’ and it had to have working, edible, hinges. Hamish complied with this tiny dictator’s request, and has continued for almost a decade. For that we may never forgive him.

Thanks to Hamish and his cake-night all-night instagram storytelling (whilst hammered), children have seen what is possible, and they are relentless in their pursuit of the perfect cake. No longer does a design from the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook suffice. Planning takes months and requires Pinterest boards and YouTube deep dives.

Hamish’s cakes move, explode and poo out chocolate. Despite all evidence pointing to your total culinary inability and aversion to any kind of ‘acts of service’ (yuk), so too can yours, in the mind of the under fives at least. A doughy-faced woman from a southern US state will tell you it’s all possible on YouTube, but it’s not. She have talents you will never have. She is otherworldly, and probably should have been a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon based on her hand-eye coordination and capacity to create neat cuts.

It’s become a national crisis. Parents across Australasia now look ahead to their children’s birthdays with dread. They plan extravagant holidays that they can barely afford, just to ensure they’re not in the country. They commit to completely unnecessary kitchen renovations to render the oven unusable. They regularly and repeatedly alter birth certificates, creating lifelong administrative confusion and issues for future partners trying to map their astrological signs.

There is, however, one upside to the cake-apocalypse.

Being the cake guy is good for the ego. Are you the person who did the invitations? An amoeba. Blew up balloons, did you? You are dust. Wrapped for pass the parcel, ordered the entertainment and assembled the fairy bread? A speck on my shoe. Cake parent? A hero for the ages.

This is the primary driver for me. I carry deep parental guilt for the period when I worked 60 hours a week and spent most of my time on planes and on the phone. Twice a year public displays of ego-building affection are the perfect salve for those wounds.

Make the cake. Your children will love you. You will create great content for instagram, broadcasting the vague sense of a together and loving parent, despite the opposite being true.

And remember, parenting - like cake decorating, or being an ant - is mostly about showing up, leaving your house in disarray, and hoping the end result isn’t too messed up.

Where is THE HIGH? If you can make the eyes of a fondant mythical creature not terrifying, it’s unbeatable.

Physical fitness? Two days is a long time to stand up in a kitchen.

Sense of satisfaction? My favourite Victoria Beckham quote is: “the most popular thing I make in my kitchen is a mango carved into a hedgehog. I do that and the kids tell everyone I’m an amazing cook.” The bar is low, and we love that.

Long-term commitment? Depends how long the parental guilt lasts, I guess.