You can can tell a lot about a person by the cakes they eat.
As an example, my grandmother’s war time sponge cake spoke of her frugality and a period in history that she lived through when eggs were more precious than gold. It was a triumph of eggless, sugar-less engineering; more holes than cake, airily sandwiched together with her pit-laden homemade blackberry jam, the fruit wrestled, at considerable discomfort and loss of blood, from spiky, tangled bushes that entwined the local hedgerows.
One of my old acquaintances loved to entertain largely to show off her impeccably staged home. She would serve an orderly Battenberg, colour coordinated with the scatter cushions, the marzipan wrap and fondant icing keeping the cake together like a tight knit sweater. She would swoop on any errant crumbs that escaped the viscous mass immediately, vacuuming them out from under guests’ feet as they sat stiff-backed on the chesterfield, gripping their chintz plates with quaking fingers.
Contrast that with the uneven slabs of farmhouse currant cake my no-nonsense mother would saw unevenly from the tin for ravenous kids come in from playing tag, the moist crumbs spackling the rim of lemonade cups.
An old schoolmate loved adventure and jam busters, but then, who doesn’t like those dumpy bundles with their sugary crust, oozing raspberry jam from their centre on the exact opposite side from the one you are eating, so it ends up all over your shirt. This schoolmate is the only person I know who could eat a whole jam buster without licking her lips; try it – it’s a torture.
Growing up, our family often had a Black Forest cake on special occasions. It is the perfect celebratory cake; sophisticated and regal with elegant whorls of dark chocolate and gleaming black cherries on snowy whipped cream perched atop a pliant sponge marbled with veins of kirsch infused cerise confit and buttercream. Decadent.
My preference, though, would be a totally unadorned, grainy slab of spicy ginger cake, which of course must be savoured with a cup of Cream Earl Grey tea and at least one chapter of a good book.
by angela lovell 