Bringing it all together with the Cake of Doom

Isn't the outdoor cinema culture brilliant?

If you are a home educator, it is like a gift from the heavens, and it's free.

Today's screening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the city park gives me an opportunity to kill several education birds with one stone. And, as we know folks, everything counts as an education in my world.

Thanks to Indiana Jones, I can yatter on about popular culture (1980s fashions in shoulders and hair); deliver Mother's Propaganda Lecture on the Representation of Women Engineered for Capitalist Economic Purposes (for which thank the film convention of dumb, blond, and screaming); talk over the role of the male in some popular narrative fiction (strong and manly. Oh how I wish it was true); and introduce a practical cookery session as a means of exploring the plot of this particular 1984 offering (thus remaining faithful to Home Education Law One).

For that last educational pursuit, I set Shark on the challenge of making a Temple of Doom cake. I tell her it must be suitable for an action movie with a deliberately culturally ignorant portrayal of Indian cooking. (Since her cake must also contain turmeric, ginger and coriander, but go easy on the curry powder, it sort of seems to support the point neatly.)