1. Preheat oven to 220 degrees Celcius. Grease a 25-cm round cake tin. (Unfortunately, forgot to check temperature of oven, think it was only about 50 degrees. And the not-smart Brother Ooi told me to grease it by spreading butter all over the tin with my bare fingers. So I did.)

To prepare Sponge Cake:
1 At low speed, mix icing sugar and ground almonds in mixer. (So far so good. Brother Ooi managed to spend half an hour doing this)

2. Add eggs gradually and whip at high speed until fluffy. (Still going fine)

3. Fold in sifted flour, cocoa powder followed by melted margerine. (What the hell does fold mean? Margerine was unavailable so butter was used. Butter was melted too early on and decided to form lumps among itself. Scraped it in anyway)

4. In a separate bowl, beat egg white and castor sugar until stiff and fold into chocolate mixture. (Egg shell pieces fell into egg white, amidst lots of cussing and mass inserting of fingers into egg white bowl to retrieve them. Later realized that there were black dots in it and decided to ignore it. Egg white and castor sugar refused to stiffen no matter how much Brother Ooi’s macho arms whirled them around. F*ck it lah)

5. Put batter into a round cake tin and bake for 10 minutes. (10 minutes wasn’t enough, due to low temperature of oven – cake was still wet. Put in for another 5 minutes – then cake became consistency of brick)

6. Trim the side of the cake and place it into 23-cm round springform cake tin. (Had to use fruit knives for this due to cake’s bricklike texture. Realized in horror that cake tin wasn’t greased well enough and that cake had stuck to bottom of pan. Efforts to remove cake from pan resulted in cake breaking up into tiny crumbs. Brother Ooi cried on my shoulder)

To prepare Cheese Topping:

1. Beat cream cheese and castor sugar in mixer until light and fluffy (No problem)

2. Add lemon zest. Cream well. ( How do you cream lemon zest?)

3. Fold in whipped cream (Poured cream in. In hindsight, wonder if cream should have been whipped first – box did not say)

4. Sprinkle gelatine over water and dissolve over low heat. Stream slowly into cheese mixture (Tried to sprinkle but gelatin fell in big lump into water. Took more than 3 mins in microwave to melt. Then hardened. Also scraped into mixture)

5. Pour topping onto cake and refrigerate until set. Decorate as desired. (Not bothering to decorate)

Miscellaneous complications:
1. Halfway through, Brother Ooi abandoned ship, leaving adorable sister all alone to handle things and ran off to take a dump.
2. Daddy Ooi kept coming into kitchen to laugh at offspring’s efforts and remind offspring that the last project offspring did together (which was assembling a DIY shoe cupboard), offspring succesfully nailed doors of shoe cupboard to the back of it so now shoe cupboard has doors on its back and a covered sheet of wood on its front.