The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas (10 page)

There are many, many ways to make a chocolate cake and I urge you to try them all, repeatedly, several times a day if possible. But sometimes, when you are in the grip of a particularly urgent need for cake – perhaps because your blood sugar has dropped to an unhealthy low after being forced to run away from a truancy officer, police swat team or irate neighbour – it is best to keep things simple. Here is the recipe I use when I need chocolate cake and I’m too delirious with hunger to do anything more complicated.

180 grams caster sugar

180 grams butter (soften in the microwave first)

180 grams self-raising flour

a pinch of salt

3 eggs

2 tablespoons of cocoa (or drinking chocolate if you’ve already eaten all your cocoa)

2 friends (one strong and one fast moving)

1.   Preheat your oven to 180°ºC.

2.   Grease a cake tin and line with baking paper. (NB. You don’t have to bother doing this if you are happy to rip the cake out of the tin a handful at a time and lick the sides clean with your tongue.)

3.   Put the sugar and butter in a bowl and mix together.

4.   Add the eggs, one at a time.

5.   Stir in the self-raising flour, salt and cocoa.

6.   Now, you must
RESIST THE URGE TO EAT THE BATTER
(at least not all of it). You might need a large strong friend to physically hold you back at this stage. Preferably while screaming ‘No, don’t do it, Nanny Piggins! Let the batter become a cake!’

7.   Get another friend to tip the batter into the cake tin.

8.   Pop the cake in the oven and bake it. Depending on what sort of oven you’ve got and what sort of tin you’ve used, it should take between 25 and 40 minutes to cook. You can tell when it’s done by poking the cake with a knitting needle. (Be sure to take any knitting off the needle before you use it, or the old lady you stole it from will get cross with you.) If it’s uncooked, the needle will have batter on it. If it’s cooked it should come out cleanly.

9.   Eat it.

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do.

Rest assured, the game
Sardines
does not actually involve the eating of sardines. Fish is bad at the best of times because it is almost never served with chocolate, but sardines are fish with extra badness because they are squashed into a tiny tin full of oil and salt, which only serves to make the fish taste extra fishy.

The only thing the game
Sardines
borrows from the fish sardines is the squashing.

Basically,
Sardines
is exactly the same as
Hide and Seek
except when you find someone you don’t loudly say, ‘Ha ha, I found you. What a terrible hiding place. What on earth made you think of hiding there?!’

No, in
Sardines
when you find the person hiding you squeeze in and hide next to them.

So if you are playing with ten people, by the end of the game there will be nine people all squashed into one hiding space while the one last sad person haplessly wanders the halls looking for you.

I once played a game of
Sardines
that lasted for six days. Luckily I had several cakes sewn into the hem of my dress so the six other players and I were able to sustain ourselves in our hiding position in a freestanding wardrobe. It was only on the seventh day, when it occurred to us that perhaps we should climb down and check, that we discovered that the last player had got bored and gone back home to Belgium.

Nevertheless,
Sardines
is an excellent game.

The children sat slumped and exhausted at the breakfast table. It was Boxing Day so they didn’t really want to eat breakfast because they had eaten so much the day before. But they knew suggesting to Nanny Piggins that they might skip a meal could lead to a long lecture on the importance of regular meals (she had no notion of the idea of injuring yourself from overeating), so the children dutifully slouched by the table waiting for her to appear. They expected her to burst out of the kitchen with chocolate-covered pancakes, or chocolate-covered waffles or chocolate-covered chocolate, like she normally did. But unsurprisingly, she managed to totally surprise them by bursting in through the hallway door dressed up from head to foot as a boxer.

The children did not know what to say. Partly because they were still brain-addled from all the calories they had consumed the day before, and partly because it had never occurred to them that their nanny might appear at the breakfast table dressed as a pugilist.

Derrick had only had seven helpings of Christmas pudding the day before so he was the first to gather his wits and ask, ‘Nanny Piggins, why are you wearing black silk shorts, a vest and boxing gloves?’

‘I’m dressed up for the boxing, of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Who are we going to fight first? Can we go down to the school? I’d love to take a swing at Headmaster Pimplestock for that disparaging remark he made about Michael’s penmanship in his last report card.’

‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ said Michael.

‘That’s a good idea,’ said Nanny Piggins enthusiastically. ‘After we’re done with the boxing, I could hit him with a stick too.’

‘Nanny Piggins,’ said Samantha carefully. She did not want to enrage her nanny when she was dressed for a day of violence. ‘You do realise that on Boxing Day there is no actual boxing?’

‘What?!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘No boxing?! Is this some sort of cruel joke? If there is no boxing, why do they call it Boxing Day?’

The children looked at each other. They had no idea. Now that they thought about it, they realised it made very little sense. It would be like calling the day after Easter ‘Kung Fu Day’, then scheduling no martial arts at all.

‘Are you telling me that today is Boxing Day and yet I’m not going to be allowed to hit anybody at all?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Well, no more than usual anyway,’ said Derrick.

‘What a dreadful disappointment,’ said Nanny Piggins as she slumped on a dining chair. ‘Still, it makes sense. I had wondered why everyone was so excited by Christmas, which is just a day of presents and eating. Boxing Day seemed so much more fun, you get all the leftover food plus the chance to hit people.’