Licking the Bowl After Making Cake…

This is one thing that everyone remembers from their childhood and something everyone still does now, isn’t it? Licking the mixing spoon or running their finger around the mixing bowl to get every last bit of cake mix.

This is something I have never done and something that now I physically cannot bare to do, and something that I will probably never let LP or LM do. You see, I grew up with a bit of a nutter as a Mother and it’s rubbed off in some ways!

You see, when BSE broke out back in the 80’s my Mum stopped eating beef completely – even so much as not eating gelatine. I grew up never having beef and when I got kicked out of home as a teenager the first thing I did was go and get a McDonalds hamburger in rebellion – I’d never had one. There was also a time, when it felt like the news was reporting CJD deaths every week, that my Mother stopped drinking milk – and so we stopped having milk. I think she thought we’d catch CJD immediately and drop down dead. She was incredibly ignorant in some ways but blinkered and incredibly tenacious – she just wouldn’t let anything go.

So growing up we didn’t eat beef. We also never had any ‘foreign’ food. My Mum thought pasta was something alien and I didn’t ever have lasagne until moving out of home! That said I never had a fish finger sandwich either – I was definitely deprived as a child!

Should you be allowed to lick the bowl when making cake?

Part of this ‘deprived’ childhood meant that I wasn’t allowed to have raw eggs under any circumstances – because I would obviously die of salmonella poisoning on the spot, instantly. I was never allowed to lick the bowl when making cakes or cookie dough, never allowed to lick the mixing spoon and enjoy the raw cake mix. Even now I will offer Dave the bowl to lick when making cakes but I will never eat raw cake batter myself, the thought of those raw eggs in that cake batter makes me feel sick and I know that feeling stems from my childhood.

I won’t ever give the children the mixing bowl to lick when we’re baking. They’ll never experience eating raw flour or cake mix. I’m sure Dave will when I’m not looking though – and I’ll make up for it by giving them spoons of butter icing and melted chocolate to lick instead!

It wasn’t all bad… I was still allowed cake, once cooked, obviously.