Burfdee and crayon eating puppies

It's Ben's birthday today and I attempted to bake a cake. I say attempted, because the end result was not as cake-like as I would have liked. For this I blame the Belgians - I have been baking cakes since my primary school decided to give cookery classes for all those not sporty enough to have been picked for the school teams and generally they turn out alright, so it must be the Belgian's fault. That's just logic.

I bought the ingredients a while back, and after staring blankly at the (small) range of flour Delhaize had to offer I thought the most sensible option would be one described as 'cake flour'. I thought, cakes rise, so this LOGICALLY must be self raising flour. It's my own fault really for trying to apply logic and common sense in a country where they come out to change bus posters at 1am but wouldn't come to connect our internet for three weeks. As you might have guessed it was not self raising flour, and Ben's cake looks like it's been sat on by a small elephant.

I ranted about this to all and sundry via the awesome medium of Facebook, and was particularly tickled by the response it got from my friend Joost, who pointed out "I couldn't possibly ever be angry at Belgianry - we of the North find they have a simplistic endearing quality about them, like puppies eating crayons. Which is why we don't let them in; they'd just get sick on our carpets."

And in Lidl whilst buying Ben's birthday dinner (pizzas - the boy is easy to please) the girl on the till who usually insists on looking in my bag said something unintelligible and I panicked. I thought she knew I was English, but apparently not. Anyway, I just looked at her with wide confused eyes and the man behind me in the queue said 'Anglais?' to which I said 'Oui, oui! Anglais!' and he smiled benevolently and repeated everything the girl had said in French, only louder. Nice to see that some things are the same anywhere you go.