This is no cooking blog. And I am no cook. But this is a blog about my life in Cyprus, and very occasionally my life includes making cakes. Christmas Tree cakes.

For me, baking is divided into two categories: grown-up baking involving Mary Berry (who?), Delia Smith (eh?) and the BBC Good Food website. I detest grown-up baking – it’s boring and intimidating. The only good thing about it is licking out the bowl – if I can get to it before Goobie.

Children’s baking, on the other hand, can be fun. For some unfathomable reason, I particularly enjoy making silly cakes at Christmas. So when a letter arrived from school assigning us to cake-making duty for the class party, I decided to have a go at making those Christmas Tree Rice Krispie cakes that everyone’s talking about on Facebook.

These Christmas Tree cakes are pretty simple to make, even by my standards. You just need marshmallows, green food colouring (ONLY green, not yellow as well – see below), butter, Rice Krispies and sweets for the tree decorations/tree trunk. For quantities and instructions, look here. There’s even a video.

Goobie and I made these cakes together. He measured out everything and chucked the marshmallows and butter in a bowl.

This is where things started to go a tad wrong. We ran out of white marshmallows and had to throw some pink ones in. There were only a few pink ones, but once we’d microwaved them, the mixture came out bright pink! We added the green and yellow food colourings. And some more. The shade of green we were left with would have made a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle proud. Tip: only use white marshmallows and green colouring. Don’t add pink or yellow!

I started to fret. The last time I used food colouring was when I was making Frozen cakes and everyone’s poo turned blue. I debated whether to message the parents of the kids in Goobie’s class to warn them of impending green poo. Nah! We’ll blame it on the stomach bug going around . . .

Goobie mixed the Rice Krispies in with the mutant marshmallow mixture and we popped it in the fridge for 5 minutes to solidify.

Next it was time to shape the mixture into the Christmas trees. Goobie gave up at this point and left me to do it. The first few looked like the little green poos they’d no doubt be producing the next day. But I eventually managed to get them to vaguely resemble a Christmas tree.

Next was the fun bit – decorating the tree with mini-Smarties. I called Goobie. Here I realised that something else had gone awry. The mini-Smarties wouldn’t stick. Perhaps I’d put too much butter in, or not enough. Who knows? Eventually, I took to rolling the trees in hundreds-and-thousands and manually attaching tiny silver balls.

I sat the trees on the wrapped chocolates that looked like tree trunks. They kept falling off. I pushed them down to stick them on, but the trees started to look poo-shaped again . . . I didn’t care at this point. Dinner was already late. I popped all the Christmas Tree cakes on a plate and put them in the fridge to fully solidify.

Next morning, the trees had properly stuck to the trunks. We carried the Christmas Tree cakes into school, sunglasses at the ready to shield eyes from the mutant ninja green. Will anyone dare eat one? I haven’t!

Perhaps next year I’ll stick with the reindeer cakes.