Cartoon unicorn with 'be unicorn' lettering on chest

You will want to know about the unicorn. Mr Pryce ordered it for his daughter's christening, and at half four this morning it was sitting on the cooling rack with its pink fondant mane gone limp from the ovens and the word on its flank reading "be unique corn", a pun nobody had ordered. Dilys had piped it at midnight with the steady hand she keeps for wedding cakes, then looked at it for a long time and laughed until she had to sit down on the flour sacks.

She didn't scrape it off. She fetched the edible pen from the drawer, drew one neat line through "unique", and wrote a small "a" above the gap, the way you'd correct a child's spelling test. "There," she said. "Be a unicorn. Much better advice for a baby." Then she pressed a pink heart cut from the trimmings onto the unicorn's side with her thumb, and it stuck exactly where a heart should be.

I asked whether Mr Pryce would notice. She said he would notice the heart, and that was the point. We packed the cake into its box at six, the light just going grey over the car park, and I wrote the card the way she dictated: the baby's name, the date, and underneath, in my roundest hand, the same line she had made.

I am still thinking about that thumbprint. Yours, Nell