The next book I will be exploring is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. There is quite a difference in the description of food in this book compared to Oliver Twist as the food in Alice in Wonderland is supposed to be magical and unordinary, well that's how I imagined it anyway. The whole book is based around weird and wonderful things and the first weird but I guess wonderful event with food happens when Alice finds herself at the bottom of a hole in the ground.

When I was growing up I was taught never to eat things that looked suspicious or if I didn't know what it was. Alice is evidently cautious about drinking the unknown substance but as it is not marked 'POISON' she deems it safe to try, this shows her naivety and lack of regard to negative consequence.

She also finds the liquid to taste quite nice and like most children anything that tastes nice they are sure to consume as much as they can of it. The syndetic listing of the flavours is very similar to the song the orphans sing in Oliver Twist, the foods they long for. The juxtaposing foods almost make it difficult to imagine what the liquid would look like. Would it look like custard or gravy?

As a child I would probably too have eaten the cake, who wouldn't? From this description I imagined it to be small and pretty looking, possibly a bright colour which would be sure to attract a little me. Unlike the gruel in Oliver Twist, the drink Alice drinks is full of flavour and the cake is delicious looking. 


I found a clip of the film and from that I decided to try and make my own version of the cake. Wish me luck! I always imagined the cake to look like a fondant fancy as they are cute, small and if I saw one I would definitely want to eat it.

So this is my attempt (let me heavily emphasize that word) at making my version of fondant fancies. My boyfriend's mum  assisted me with the baking, so luckily I didn't burn anything! This was the Mary Berry recipe I followed:

Right! Here we go!

First things first I got all the ingredients together, grabbed a large mixing bowl and very carefully measured and whisked the mix together.

So far so good! The mixture didn't go lumpy like it usually does for me and in the end we got a smooth consistency that was ready to be spooned out and put in the oven, brilliant!

This is the cake glazed with apricot jam and then with a thin layer of marzipan placed on top. Yes, I did have help with the marzipan, there's no way I would have got it looking as neat as that!

I then sliced the sponge into 25 hopefully even looking squares and then squeezed out blobs of butter cream on top.

(Still so far so good!)

However, after I took these photos things you could say took a turn for the worst. I sadly don't have any photos of my disaster as things were getting very hot and stressed in the kitchen and photos were the last thing on my mind.

So we attempted to make the icing to cover the cakes, but as much as we tried, the consistency was never right and just ran off the cake, then to make matters worse a cake 'fell' on the floor. So as you can imagine, I was sticky, stressed and it was verging on midnight at this point so I just wanted to get to bed and be done with it!

I persevered and the next morning I woke up to these:

So some were slightly wobbly but I was really happy with this one. So all the stress and hard work paid off to get one practically perfect one... Here you have it my own imagined Alice in Wonderland 'Eat Me' cake.