Our Cake Bastard (A 21st Century Parable)

Dear children,

Once upon a time, and a very very good time it was, a man and a woman were living together in an apartment in Raheny. They were not married and therefore in the eyes of Gawd and the Chorch they were technically living "in sin" as they say. As if this were not bad enough, they were shagging as well, the pair of durty hoors. His name was Johnny and hers was Teresa. She came from Offaly, so that probably explains it. She was awfully fond of offal into the bargain, but as Fr Brian would say, that's just sick. And kind of irrelevant.

But one day as Johnny and Teresa were sitting together at the pre-marital breakfast table Johnny had an idea.

"Teresa," sez he, "do you know how to bake?"

Teresa looked at him for a minute as if he had suddenly turned into a monkey. "What? Ay doon't knoo ennything about beeking!"

"Well then," says Johnny, "why don't we take cookery classes?"

Teresa mulled this over in her simeon little brain for a few moments and then shrugged her shoulders, indicating that whatever was to be done was Johnny's decision.

So, Johnny, being a good boy, enrolled them both in cookery classes. Every evening they tried new recipes and never again did they have to phone up Domino's Pizza.

The following Christmas, buoyed by their new-found culinary prowess, they invited Johhny's posh Ballsbridge-dwelling aunt and uncle for Christmas dinner. Perhaps it wasn't a wise choice for their first Christmas dinner, but how and ever. The dinner turned out fairly all right on the day, but it was what happened afterwards that we will concern ourselves with.

Jump back six weeks. Johnny and Teresa had taken the initiative and began to bake a Christmas cake. But no ordinary Christmas cake. This was a superbly fabulous Christmas cake containing only the most expensive ingredients. But most of all it was a joint effort between the little culinary couple. The cake turned out all right and they left it wrapped up until Christmas day when they cut a few slices for Johnny's aunt and uncle.

Now the problem was, Teresa was just a little bit thick and so she mistakenly added a whole bottle of whiskey to the cake, as well as lashings of cinnamon. Now, because of some bizarre chemical reaction which resulted from the fact that the whiskey was in excess and so the cinnamon was the limiting reactant, as soon as Johnny's aunt Margerie took a bite of her slice of cake her skin started breaking out in awful red spots and she promptly expired. Uncle Jimeny was so shocked at this that he had a very large heart attack and died also. And there were Johnny and Teresa, left staring at the bodies of Johnny's poor posh relations.

You see, the moral of the story of the story is this, you see. Indeed. Johnny and Teresa shouldn't have been shagging when they weren't married, but they didn't care. And they shouldn't have been making cakes together either. The problem was that being unmarried, the cake that was the product of their relationship was thus a bastard cake, also known as a cake bastard. And so it was always going to be cursed. Especially afterwards, when they were both arrested for poisoning poor aunt Margerie.

And there you have it. The Poop and the Chorch were right once again. 1-0 to the Vatican.