AustLit

'The day before my fourth birthday my mother made a magnificent cake. She had found the design in one of her magazines - the witch's cottage from Hansel and Gretel. I watched, entranced, as she carved the vanilla pound cake into section. A fat square for the base, and two triangles for wedged above it for the roof. The layers were glued together with thick butter icing; not ideal for engineering, as by the time my party came around one-half of the roof was listing badly in the Brisbane humidity. The entire production was on the verge of collapse, and a hasty fix with toothpicks would be needed to prevent it from toppling, minutes before our gusts arrived. Family and friends might be impaled by the lurking infrastructure, but the star feature of her party table had been saved.' (Introduction)