If I'd Known You Were Coming, I'd Have Baked A Cake

Do you have a jumpy Gah! They're HERE?! moment when visitors arrive? Whether they're genuinely unexpected, planned-but-semi-absent-mindedly-half-distracted-from-preparing-for, parents (in which case you can start getting sorted out a full two weeks in advance and still feel utterly caught on the hop), or just organised people running anything earlier than the fashionable 15 minutes late (in which case, please give lessons in how you manage it), I always seem to feel like I fell into a time warp and lost a seemingly-critical hour along the way. I suspect the only seemingly-critical thing is potentially the hostess - of herself...

Fiona Cairns Victoria sponge cake; picture by Jason Lowe via The Independent - this was a recent highly successful but sadly un-photographed expansion of the baking repertoire. Although mine replaced a whipped cream filling with a lemon and cream cheese frosting, as well as the traditional jammy middle. There will be a reprise (with camera) as soon as a halfway decent excuse (or, failing that, a little more time) presents itself...

Much as the thought of being Martha Stewart-esque kitchen queen who throws together an exquisitely measured shindig without a hair or a dribble of gravy out of place, there's the resounding feeling that it's so much more welcoming, fun and sanity-preserving to be a domestic goddess Nigella-style. To be found in your natural habitat with unruly hair, wafts of promise escaping from a clutter of saucepans and licking the wooden spoon. And to smile, secure in the knowledge that the important bits will all somehow come together once the important people have done the same.

P.S. The title of this post might belie (and oh, how that word looks wrong however I attempt to spell it...) the likely eventuality that I will have baked a cake (or, even more probably, brownies) regardless of even the unlikeliest of visitors or any vaguely tenuous justification.

P.P.S. And for anybody who knows me in real life, this post isn't intended in the slightest as a deterrent from bringing yourselves round, or as a plea to arrive four hours late so I can finish running, chicken-like, about (as that may lead to Gah! They're not coming! and subsequent arrival being met with a pjyama clad appearance). It's just a small musing on the peccadilloes of penguins...