Cake-mixed metaphors

Family and friends will know I like to bake the odd cake. My most frequent cake is a chocolate one – a family favourite with reliable results. The trouble is that baking is an art, not a science, and while you can follow the recipe and control the variables fairly well, no two home-made cakes are identical. (Not even this pair I cooked up with a friend recently, though they came pretty close...)

Things go wrong sometimes (that’s life). And the last time I made my usual cake, the poor sponge couldn’t quite take the weight of the icing I poured on the top.
 

 
The icing on the cake was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I thought. Which just goes to show that I don’t actually think about the things I put into words. If George Orwell was alive today he’d be turning in his grave. (I wish I had come up with this line, but it’s actually a misquote from the film Brassed Off.) Orwell lamented the decline of the English language, noting (amongst other things) that “incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying”.

But isn’t that part of what makes language fun?