Do you need to cake? If your loved one is celebrating a birthday, wedding, divorce or bar mitzvah, you might need to cake. Nobody – and this, I must remind you, is the law – can celebrate properly without cake.

What I’m saying is that you almost certainly need to cake. But how do you cake? Don’t worry. I will tell you.

Here is a simple step-by-step caking recipe, complete with pictures.

1: Gather ingredients

You will need flour, sugar, eggs, loads of other things, and every bowl you own. If you do not own many bowls, try asking friends and neighbours if they can lend you some bowls. The main thing you will need is bowls.

Assemble your ingredients (as shown above) and weigh them. Weighing things is important. Put everything on the scales. This is a good way of finding out in advance how much cake you will end up with.

2: Mix ingredients together

Put all the ingredients together in a big bowl, except some of them, because you will need some of them later. Mix them. Doing this yourself is very boring, so ideally, get a machine that will do it for you while you have lunch.

You will need to mix all the cake things until they form a sort of thick sludge. As a reference, aim for a light slurry the colour and texture of something you might dredge out of a canal in a part of the country with clay-based soil.

3: Bake cake mixture

Everything you have done so far is literally worthless without the baking part, so this is important. Put the cake mixture in the oven and – I cannot stress this enough – make sure the oven is on. Then leave it alone for half an hour or something.

Your cake slop will turn into actual cake via the gift of heat.

4. Mix more ingredients together

If you have been following this recipe closely, you will still have some ingredients left that you didn’t mix together in step 2. Mix those ingredients together now and, if your cake is still hot, put the resulting mix in the fridge for a bit.

Don’t leave it in the fridge for too long or you will end up with something resembling cement, not that I’d know because that definitely didn’t happen.

5. Assemble the components

Think of your cake as a sort of elaborate sandwich or perhaps an educational model depicting layers of sedimentary rock or alluvial silt. You will, in other words, need to take the things you have mixed and combine them in layers. Gradually form a tall pile of cake parts as neatly as you can.

In the example below, the letter “S” has been made from extra cake parts and positioned on the top. “S” is short for “Satisfactory” and indicates that this cake has passed its mandatory quality control inspection.

6. Apply uncooked stuff to the cooked bits

Now take all the remaining cake mix, which was not cooked in the oven and also not left in the fridge for so long it took on the texture of cement, and smear it all over the pile of cake.

Voila! You have now caked. Congratulations. You will naturally feel like celebrating and should begin festivities at once.

You’re welcome.