food for thought.
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mconcerned. Not concerned
nough to wake at 4am in a
essof twisted sheets and fright
butconcerned nonetheless...
omewhere between, ‘Will I
seat on this bus?’ and ‘Is that
rt off or is it just kefir?’ What’s
erning me is that we aren’t
plain cakes enough love.
thepast decade we’ve all gone
ngbonkers, and I fear we’ve
ight of the delights of the
, plain cake – which, let’s face
often the most comforting and
ious of all.
is is in part the Bake Off
t, where a showstopper is
lly,not for tea. All hail these
hty, doughy souls – and
biscuit chess sets, spinning
uembouche windmills and
d lions with rosemary
kers and almond claws – but
uinely find competitive
ingprogrammes anxiety-
cing. I don’t want to watch
e weep over cracked
ngues, sunken tops and split
rd. Life is tough enough.
seems profoundly odd to me
wemetaphorically carry bling
rsaloft, on a palanquin of
ynamic artisanal baguettes,
use they can bake a cake that
s like a watermelon. Actual
rmelons exist and are quite
ous, thank you very much –
they are a first-rate fruit, not
ond-rate cake.
rsonally, I blame fondant. Its
sition from the professional
e domestic kitchen coincides
st exactly with the moment
tarted calling a cake a ‘bake’.
theAstroTurf of the baking
d,destroying anything beneath
it withits charmless, sugary
perfection. It can be tortured into
any colour and shape, making it the
darling of the form-over-flavour,
Insta-baker crowd.
The backlash has started, though.
There is even a 112,000-strong
Reddit group (visit reddit.com and
search ‘fondant hate’), in which
members discuss “the devil’s sugary
Play-Doh” in threads with nameslike This is Hell, Gross, Ewww,
and My God. And, of course, there
is the anti-fondant fashion for naked
cakes, as refreshing and confident
in their nudity as flapper girls
breaking out of Edwardian corsets.
In all of this competitive cakery
we are at risk of forgetting the
magic of a simple, old-fashioned
cake. These over-elaborate crèmes
fatales of the patisserie world, with
their glitter and ganache, distract
us from what cake can be – which
is a pleasure, a joy even, and one of
life’s easy wins. They are something
anyone can make (literally child’s
play in many cases): our comfort
within and armour against the
chaos without. Let’s hear it formadeira cake, dundee cake, seed
cake and, at this time of year,
simnel cake [see p65 for a super-
simple simnel loaf cake recipe].
Every nation has its own versions- from France’s quatre-quarts
to America’s pound cakes and
Mexico’s panqués. These are
reliably delicious as they are or can
be endlessly tweaked with a little
more vanilla, a hint of cinnamon,
cardamom or citrus, some nuts or
fruit, a glaze or a syrup...
There’s not a cake in the world
I love more than Nigella’s lemon
drizzle cake. We’ve been through
a lot together. Good times, bad
times and emergency tea times;
this cake has been my plus-one
for those ‘please-bring-something’
bake sales, a last-minute pudding
with bought ice cream and my
balm on days when everything’s
awful. I could make it with my
eyes closed, and probably have, it
being the cake I bake most when
insomnia hits, its buttery, citrus
aroma the sweetest consolation
prize as dawn breaks in my kitchen.
Truth be told, I come from a long
line of aggressively terrible cooks.
But my Great Auntie Louie
somehow dodged that family
gene, and her house was a shining,
vanilla-scented beacon in my
childhood. There was always
something in a tin. She didn’t
have a lot, but she baked to dignify
the day and create something from
almost nothing, so she always
had something to offer visitors.
I sometimes wonder what she
would have thought about a cake
that looked like a watermelon.
Of course, with her good Welsh
hands she probably could have
made one, but why would she want
to? Certainly not while butterfly
cakes and fairy cakes, fruit loavesand victoria sandwiches, cheese
scones and rock buns, cherry cake
and coffee-and-walnut cake exist
in this world.
Simple cakes make you focus
on the magic because baking
is magic. Yes, yes, I know, it’s
science; but something else
happens, some strange alchemy.
By creaming together butter
and sugar, beating in eggs and
folding in flour, then adding heat,
cake happens. But happiness
happens, memories happen,
calm happens, too. It doesn’t
matter if the end results are
a little wobbly or imperfect.
We are, all of us, a little wobbly
and imperfect and nonetheless
worthy of love.
In accepting our cakes’
faults (their cracks and
bubbles, their sunken
middles and tough edges)
and embracing them,
in knowing that, for all
their flaws, they still
make us smile, perhaps
we can learn to embrace
our own.My Great Auntie Louie was a shining,
vanilla-scented beacon in my childhood. There
was always something in a tin. She didn’t have
a lot, but she baked to dignify the daysedeliciousmagazine.co.uk 67