Gym addicts and birthday cakes

I've been going to the gym a lot lately. Like, six days a week. Part of it has to do with enthusiasm fuelled by an opportunistic spot of weight loss (female fact: if you lose weight, you suddenly want to exercise so you can get EVEN THINNER. If you don't lose weight you have no desire to exercise at all, based on how flabby you feel as you stumble off the cross trainer. Intellectually illogical, but emotionally it makes perfect sense to all women). Part of it has to do with bloody minded determination to get my new foot working as well as it can, and to beat all previous records for post-foot reconstruction-rehabilitation. This latter motivation has been a major mistake as overwork in the gym has inflamed my anchor stitch (don't ask) making my newly realigned heel almost impossible to walk on, which in the words of my unsympathetic GP and a good proportion of my exasperated friends, Serves Me Right. Anyway. The more you go to the gym, the more you tap into the community of weird people who like to be there. I hate to be there myself. I've already ranted in this blog about the effect of global warming on my ability to realise my desire of bootcamp on Hampstead Heath. The amount of rain we've had, it'd be more like bootcamp on Hampstead Bog, followed by months of treatment for foot rot, and I'm just not that hard core. So, gym it is. And there are lots of people there who either genuinely love it there, or they are gym addicts, or they have no friends. I kind of suspect at least two of those three reasons are linked. Around me I see unconscionably slender women dressed head to do in black spandex, manipulating the cross trainer with feverish intensity while reading a back copy of Hello! and swapping fashion tips into their Blackberries. In the weights room seriously over-muscled men vie with each other to pick up the heaviest weight, and then, much more importantly, make the loudest noise, with the weight, with their mouths, and I'm afraid also with their bums (sudden unclenching has a very unfortunate consequence) when they thump the weight back on the floor. These are people who have quite obviously been there for a while before I pitched up for my decorous workout, and by the time I have finished an hour later, are no closer to looking like they have any intention of leaving. Maybe at the end of the day they simply collapse with exhaustion on a training mat, then wake up again the next morning still in the chest fly position on the weights bench, peel themselves off, and start again. Me, I have other fish to fry, or more accurately, cakes to bake.  Three birthday cakes, to be exact, two for fitftieth birthdays and one for a soon-to-be twelve year old boy. Now I am not a particularly creative birthday cake baker. If you want a cake in the shape of a computer, or a guitar, or a football, or frankly anything that isn't your good old fashioned flat circle, I am not your woman. My creativity is in the toppings. I have two drawerfuls of decoration and after I've made my white cake and slathered it with white chocolate buttercream - or I've made my chocolate sourcream and covered it with dark chocolate ganache - or I've made my mudcake etc etc - you get the gist right? - yummy sponge with to-die-for icing - I pull out my haul of decorations and I agonise over them, matching them to the occasion. Fifty years is golden, so I'm off to Harvey Nicks to spend a ridiculous amount of money on their edible gold icing. Easy peasy. A white cake with gold icing will look kind of camp, and utterly delicious. My birthday cakes for kids are usually covered with Maltesers, chocolate buttons, M&Ms and pieces of fudge. Oh yes, there is no either/or. It's the whole caboodle, to the endless delight of the kids who snarf it down. It's only recently that I have discovered finesse in decorating cakes, hence my possession of soft red glitter, violet flowers, yellow marzipan baby birds, and spun sugar dolls. I'm tempted to make a batch of cup cakes, top them with my richest frosting, scatter my decorations variously over each one, take them to the gym and hand them out to all the Hello! perusing stick insects, in an altruistic effort to encourage them to Get A Life.