The proof of the pudding

My parents are coming to lunch. Of course I have completely overdone it and it looks as though a tribe of starving people are coming to lunch.  I have so massively overcatered and now I must redecorate the house.  Well, I might cast around a hoover and decontaminate the downstairs loo. I cleaned the silver last week.

I made an amazing pudding during which every conceivable thing went wrong.  It is now in the fridge being prayed for.  It is a strawberry charlotte and I took the recipe off someone's blog who had had an equally awful time making it - she was actually marginally worse than me.  I only wasted half a pint of cream, she got through a whole heap of stuff and I truly admire her tenacity .  I have picked almost every strawberry in the garden but I still need loads more for the top as this thing is seriously massive.  I wonder if some more could grow by lunch?  Maybe I will sneak out to a shop and waste more money on this stupid pudding.  Mr Smith already had to do an extra cream run as I had run out and I tried to use some frozen cream but I was a bit impatient and microwaved it whereupon it curdled into scrambled egg.  I then dropped the new cream all over side and onto the floor catching most of it inside my oven gloves.  I emptied them out and scooped up what I could off the floor and side and whipped it up - nobody will know. I also had some terrible sponge finger moments and a mousse deficit.  I bet everyone is on a diet - like me - and will pass on pudding.

What am I going to do with the massive amount of leftovers?  I have a brilliant idea.  I will serve only the outside saving the whole central section for another occasion.  No, it will collapse and, as it's really a big strawberry mousse cake you need to have a whole slice.  I would have made it in a smaller tin but the raised game pie is in that and, actually, that's looking lunatically huge too.

Time to make a salad out of what I can find under the frames in my garden (ah slugs) and 10 tons of everything else.  I do seem to be having a quantity issue here.  It's as though I am a Lilliputian chef expecting Gulliver and his wife for lunch.  And I can't stop.

Oooooh so exciting next door has just caught fire and a fire engine full of delicious firemen has just turned up - must dash.  They might be hungry.