Hung over

I am hung over. I have a headache from Hades and feel sick, queasy and generally bleargh.

“It’s your own fault,” I hear you cry, “you shouldn’t have drunk so much on your birthday!”

But that’s where you’re wrong – all I had to drink yesterday was one glass of red wine. So there.

This is in fact a food hangover. More specifically, a sugar hangover.

Needless to say there was plenty of food for dinner, and the highlight was my birthday cake.

When I use the word cake, you probably have in your mind something like a sponge cake with filling and topping. This would be misleading.

Imagine a seriously chocolaty chocolate cake that was all filling and no cake

This huge cake was 2½ to 3 inches thick. Its base was chocolate meringue (a homemade meringue mix with good quality cocoa powder), which was topped with a thick layer of mascarpone mixed with icing sugar and vanilla extract. This was topped with a thin layer of rich, dark chocolate ganache (chocolate and cream, basically), another layer of chocolate meringue and finally topped with an extremely thick layer rich, dark chocolate ganache.

This is the kind of cake that you put on 2lbs just by looking at it.

I had a big slice.

I had a second big slice.

Later in the evening, while bloated and sprawled on the sofa, it was suggested that any remaining cake ought to be finished tonight so that we could return to our healthy eating regime tomorrow, without any temptations left sitting in the kitchen. It made perfect sense to me, so I had another large slice.

This morning is clearly payback time.

I find myself yearning for fresh fruit and vegetables.