The Strawberry Sisters (25 page)

Ask an adult to preheat the oven to 180 or gas mark 4. If your big sister offers to do it, you can annoy her by saying, ‘You’re not a grown up’.

Cream the butter and the sugar in a mixing bowl (this just means smooshing them with a wooden spoon until the sugar is all mixed in).

Add the eggs one by one and stir some more (WARNING: it’s safer to crack your eggs on the side of the bowl than on your head, I tried that once and, let me tell you,
egg doesn’t make very good shampoo).

Sieve the flour into the bowl and stir again.

Put your cake cases into a twelve hole bun tray. We’ve only got one bun tray so that means we have to cook them in two goes because twelve cakes doesn’t go very
far in my family.

Use a teaspoon to dollop the mixture into the cases. Mum says the best way to do this is to use your little finger to slide the mixture off the spoon and into the case, that
way you only get one sticky finger. I say, the more sticky fingers you get, the more licky fingers you get.

Get your adult to put the cakes in the oven. They should be done in 10-12 minutes. You can tell that they’re finished when the tops go golden brown or, if you live in
my house, when Lucy says, ‘Are they ready yet?’ for the millionth time.

Leave the cakes to cool for as long as you can bear. An hour is good.

Sieve the icing sugar into a small bowl. I always pretend I’m the witch of winter making it snow when I do this.

Add the water and stir. You want the icing to be quite thick, if it’s too runny it will slide right off the cakes. If it’s really stiff add a few more drops of
water, if it’s too wet sprinkle in a bit more icing sugar, but be careful – once, I kept on adding more water then more icing sugar and I ended up with pints and pints of icing (I
thought it was nice on cereal but no one else agreed).

Dribble the icing on the cakes with a teaspoon – you can use the back of the spoon to smooth it out.

While the icing is still wet add any kind of decoration you like – sprinkles, chocolate drops, tiny sweets. I like all three together, but Lucy prefers plastic
spiders.

Do the washing up, or pay Ella with cakes to do it for you.

Just like Ella, Candy Harper grew up in a rather small house with a rather large family. As the fourth of five sisters it was often hard to get a word in edgeways, so she
started writing down her best ideas. It’s probably not a coincidence that her first ‘book’ featured an orphan living in deserted castle.

Growing up, she attended six different schools, but that honestly had very little to do with an early interest in explosives.

Candy has been a bookseller, a teacher and the person who puts those little stickers on apples. She is married and has a daughter named after Philip Pullman’s Lyra.

You can follow her on Twitter @CandyHarper_