LIVING THE FAIRY TALE

make her
a doll's house from
McVities Gingerbread
Cake she absolutely adores
"Yum...yum!"

*

Her dolls line up on the kitchen table. Keeping their greedy eyes on the ingredients, The Golden Syrup gleams in a bowl like a jewel. For this session of cooking with Daddy( always good for a laugh)the lights have..**** them gone...out.

We prepare ourselves by candlelight.
I swear one of the dolls winks and licks her lips in the flickering. The big doll that can wet herself...wets herself.  
Little daughter is wearing a chief's traditional hat many sizes too big for her. She wears it like a crown. She looks like a mushroom come alive.

"Tonight..." I proclaim like the showman that I am to my assembled audience of girl and dolls. "Tonight I shall create before your very own eyes...my very own Jamaican Ginger Cake." I get dolls and girl to say the magic words "Yum Yum YUM!" and hey presto we're off.

Tilly tells the dolls in a loud whisper that "Daddy isn't as good at this as Mummy is!" My pride smarts. I'll show the little blighters I swear and swear to myself.

"Just get on with it!" the dolls scream silently.

Tilly already has a finger( not her own)in the Golden Syrup. She licks the guilty finger and fibs outlandishly "Dolly wanted to taste it!"
The black treacle remains untouched. The dolls don't like it. "Only in the cake!" Tilly confesses.

Soon spices and flour are sifted. Eggs beaten to within an inch of their lives...whisking about the bowl. "Let there be light!" I invoke the Gods and the lights come back. I am indeed favoured.

Tilly falls asleep in the kitchen's fug and warmth...curled about her sleeping cat. The cat is always asleep even when awoke.

The dolls never take their eyes off of me.

Now comes the time when the cake puffs up with pride and sits on its plate like a newly crowned monarch.  It's...it's...not bad for a Dad. But looks a bit the worse for wear..bits falling off here and there...a bit eaten...just a nibble and maybe another little nibble.

"But why Mr. Dempsey..." my Indian grocer demands with amazement "...do you want thirty..THIRTY McVities  Jamaican Ginger Cakes...for why...it's not the end of the world is it...or Brexit?"

"I'm building a house!" I whisper to him as if it is our little secret.

When she awakes..the cat as ever still asleep ...she yawns "Dolls gone..where dolls goned?"

The kitchen looks as immaculate as a conception...as if man has never touched it.

"Shhh...dolls is sleep!" I say sotto voce and adopting her lingo.
"In their own house!" I add for extra measure. Her eyes go wide.

And indeed dolls are lying down with eyes shut tight inside...their newly constructed Jamaica Gingerbread House. All except for the big doll who wet herself and who I have propped up on the loo. Although she is on the loo she finds now she can't go.

"Mmm!" Tilly  mmms. "Dolls have lovely house!" eating the door and half the roof off. Cake in her curls...cake up her nose and in an ear. She eats it with all of her head. "MMMM!" she mmmms again.

"We won't tell if you don't..." the winking doll whispers (like the co-conspirator that she is) waking up in a real life fairy tale "..if you don't tell!"

The next evening... the house eaten...I pop into Mr. Patel's. "Surely not more!" he almost flinches.

"No...just the one this time Mr. Patel...just the one!"