Cake

When I'm not writing poems or doing any of the other many things I do, and therefore don't do very well, I make cupcakes and then decorate them so sickeningly that they don't even taste very nice any more... BUT they DO look pretty, and this, as we all know, is the most important thing...

These brightly coloured fellas on the right are the most recent batch, made in honour of a little documentary called Making the Difference. It made it to the final twelve of Virgin Media Shorts 2009, which means that it will soon be coming to a cinema screen near you. To celebrate, I placed the aforementioned cakes in strategic locations around London's south bank, as mini art installations. Me and the crew of cake-placers were somewhat hindered by a group of German students who were quite certain that the cakes were in fact for eating not viewing, but it was great fun nonetheless.

The second batch I ever made, seen to the left, were, frankly, for bribery. Making the Difference was originally made for the Exeter Phoenix's 'Two Short Nights' festival (and it won the audience award), and the directors thought that perhaps it might work in their favour to pleasure the staff of the Phoenix with some offerings. So these chaps were born...

But the reason I ever got into the cake thing in the first place was for cakes to appear in the documentary - the full, eight-minute version of which can be seen here. The first batch looked like this:

Taking them around Exeter and asking random people to pose with them was great, although allowing the seagull to devour my labour of love was a little painful.

So there is a little bit about cake. I like cake a lot. I make normal, edible cakes often. But they don't look as remarkable as these folk. Decorating them is a time-consuming task, but it's also brilliant fun.