Cake, chocolate and raspberry tarts.

Here's a lovely picture of Mark's birthday cake, for once not created by himself, but by a fancy shop in town. The Sydney Opera house, chocolate sculpture topping was worth a couple of days of puritan vegetable soup, 6,000 calories a wave I should think.
We very rarely go in Pujola: once a year at Easter to buy something for Ezra, mainly as it's a chance to gawp at the array of beautiful chocolate eggs, fish and chickens all done up with bright satin ribbons. Occasionally I might call in to buy a jam tart as theirs are better than any others I've ever tasted.
My Aunty Lily (featured as the Queen a few posts back) used to make raspberry jam tarts. I'd love to be able to say that they were delicious, that I would crave the sound of her ancient biscuit tin being taken out of the pantry. Alas not.
Out would come the tin: "Here, my darling, I've made tarts! I know how much you love them." They were almost ceramic in their hardness, the jam burnt to the bottom of the pastry in dark, Dracula pools. Aunty Lily and her musty smelling front room with the three bar electric fire; 1950's red and black curtains, Daily Mirror and Players No 6.
We would eat the tarts, drink tea and then she would heave herself out of her chair muttering about where the cat had got to. I would shrink into my own chair, embarrassed, knowing the words she was about to yell over the back garden.
The back door would creak and she'd stand there, calling for the huge monster cat: "Nigger, NIGGER, Nigs, where are you?"