Herman the German (but it's a cake!) and a WEIRD coincidence...

You've heard of it, right? If you haven't, then by the time you've read this, my poor uneducated reader, you will! (Please don't let that put you off.)

Yes, yes, you're perfectly correct. It's the plastic container of bubbling dough, passed on by a desperate acquaintance... the friendship cake... it's Herman the German.

But, I hear you say, I thought he was your monkey?

He is!!

And here comes the weird coincidence. I was the only one on camp who to my knowledge had heard of the HtG cake version. And I wanted to call my monkey Horatio. Peer pressure forced me to call him Herman instead. And Herman rhymes with German so I suppose that was inevitable.

But that name was not original. It was already the name of a gloopy mixture.

Yet when I protested that I did not want my monkey named after a cake, no one believed me...

And weirdly enough, Herman the German was re-invented!!... as the name of a monkey.

My theory was that someone had heard of the cake, and so the name was floating around in the back of their mind, and popped up when I was looking for a nice name beginning with H.

But a-a-anyway, let's move onto the cake.

Right now I am wavering between abusing Herman with cynical wrath... or gushing about him in ecstatic praise.

On the one hand, we have been eating barely anything else all week.

On the other, he tastes rather... tasty.

Oh, please, you have to have heard of him! No? He's basically a mixture of sour dough handed to you in a container by a friend, usually desperate to get rid of him. You look after him for ten days (during which you become very fond of him), stir him to keep him producing bubbles, feed him milk and sugar and lumps of apple and cinammon and... well, numerous other things, and then at last, divide him into four and bake one of his babies.

It sounds rather gruesome, but it has a gorgeous end result.

The smell as it comes out of the oven... it's glorious. Really.

The other three parts, you pass on to your most devoted friends... or by the time you've finished with Hermie - anyone you can persuade to carry him away.

We've only just got rid of ours, after about four weeks worth of Herman clones. I'm rather sorry to see him go - he'd almost become a fixture - but on the other hand, I was beginning to worry about getting too fat.

So Herman got passed on to the populace.

I thought we were finally rid of him.

I then turned up at our Young People's Fellowship one evening, and guess what was on the snacks table? Slices of Herman.

And... wait for it, it gets much, much worse... My poor brainwashed (or Herman-washed) mother, told me this morning that she wanted to get him back from the friend we'd bestowed him to, so that she could pass it on to some interested family members!!

Those family members being people I will see in a relatively short amount of time...

I'm being haunted by Herman. I'd prefer the monkey.