Birthday Cake
We decided to start Birthday Cake at a chicken farm after buying some of the lovely, pale, blue-green eggs produced from Old Cotswold Legbar chickens. The farmer lets his chickens run free on his land in Worcestershire so they were very healthy and not at all disturbed by our filming. In fact, the small hen houses were so clean that, much to the farmer's amazement, our cameraman actually squeezed himself inside one in order to take a shot for the film!
To see the cakes being made, we went to Mrs Gill's Country Cakes factory in Tiverton, Devon. Actually, it's more like a large kitchen than a factory, full of pots and pans and some quite ancient equipment. The cooks (or "cake ladies" as we call them in the narration) were two wonderful characters who could have come out of that classic TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs", and they were presided over by Mrs Gill herself, who also helped with the baking. Only natural and traditional ingredients are used, and they're measured out by hand before being mixed in what looks like one of the first electric mixers ever made! But take it from us - the results are delicious.
By the way, the tradition of putting candles on a birthday cake dates back to the ancient Greeks, who used to believe that it made the cake light up like the moon and would therefore attract the beneficent attention of the moon-God, Artemis.
We thought we'd break up the cake baking sequence by showing what other things could be made from eggs, and for this we enlisted the help of celebrity chef Lesley Waters. Lesley runs her own cookery school at her home in Dorset, and made us very welcome when we filmed there. We came away satisfied on two counts: one, because we knew the filming had gone well; and two, because we ate most of what Lesley cooked!
For the end of the film, we wanted to use the "Happy Birthday" music over the sequence of the birthday party; but it appears that, because it is probably the most frequently sung piece of music in the world, the copyright owner can charge a considerable amount of money to allow it to be used on a DVD! So, instead, we used some music which we hope captures the spirit of "Happy Birthday To You" without breaking the Magic of Making's bank!
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Production Notes
Locations:
Legbars of Broadway, Broadway, Worcestershire (hens);
Mrs Gill's Country Cakes, Tiverton, Devon (cake ladies);
Lesley Waters' Cookery School, Frome St Quintin, Dorset;
A town-house in Plymouth, Devon (birthday party).