Baking a cake for a man who hates you!

Plus fifteen amazing recipes to make after the inevitable break up

I’ve always had a sweet tooth. So sweet that when I was eight a dentist gave me a GOLD TOOTH in order to protect the poor thing from my endless diet of sugar. I didn’t know the dentist had done this until I went back to school that afternoon and another kid asked why I looked like a pirate. A fairly drastic action, but clearly the dentist and my mother came to the joint decision that I wasn’t going to cut back on cake. They were right! For a while, the supply chain was dictated by my parents but once I realised I could bake my own, all bets were off. It started with my childminder, who was absolutely insane in her determination to make us the most ambitious birthday cakes imaginable in the 80s. These usually came from a book called “Novelty cakes and other novelty food.” Admittedly the title could’ve done with a little more work but it was the olden days and nobody had to worry about SEO. I just found a copy for £4.60 and ordered it immediately. I have to be honest, I am not at all confident that any of these creations will taste good, I distinctly remember a carousel cake my sister got for her birthday which was held up with large cardboard spokes, but holy hell the nostalgia hit will make up for it. I am slightly worried by the threat of “other novelty food,” since there’s no way this doesn’t involve sandwiches doing cultural appropriation.

From those heady days as a unwanted sous chef for my competitive childminder, I graduated to making cakes whenever I wanted (using Roald Dahl’s revolting recipes, if you order it be aware that Bruce Bogtrotter’s chocolate cake still bangs but I cannot vouch for any of the other recipes). There was a decade or so where I gave up this hobby in favour of eating Sara Lee frozen gateau, never able to wait until they were entirely thawed, usually all in one go. There is a deep shame to this, which you will not understand unless you too were once addicted to semi frozen cake, I am still amazed I was able to wean myself off them and return to home baking. I can’t even tell you whether Sara Lee frozen gateau tastes good, I only remember the sensation (slightly mossy) and I cannot try it again - not even for ‘research’ - for fear I will relapse.

That was a tangent. I clearly had to go through something there, let’s hastily move on from Sara Lee and her siren call and get back to it. I returned to baking as an adult! Just around the time my first husband was secretly (and not so secretly, when I look back on it) deciding that he hated being married to me with the kind of passion he’d never shown for me before. I don’t think anyone has ever hated anything as much as he hated being married to me (and I hate Gail’s bakery a lot). I will illustrate this with the following cake story.

All these years later, it still haunts me

The Christmas before we broke up, my mum bought me a day at a cookery school. It was a class based around dessert, and though I am loath to do communal activities ever, I dutifully went along and made gelato in the morning, honeycomb biscuits at lunchtime and then finally a much anticipated showstopper of a cake. The cake had several different layers, a sponge obviously, that’s bog standard, then a crème pat (if you abbreviate it, you automatically sound like a pro). There was handmade marzipan - marbled - strawberries (which I am allergic to) and maybe one other layer which I’ve forgotten. Oh yes! A marzipan flower, which we were told to design ourselves, freestyle. Why on earth they designed a course with the precision of your dad planning an airport run only to let us go nuts with the most important visual element of this cake I do not know. Anyway, it took four hours and I over-marbled the icing but it was a success. And then I took it home to triumphantly present it to my husband (who, you will remember, hated me) and he promptly told me the flower looked like a vagina. And the thing is, he was right. Sort of. It actually looked like a vulva, but which man has ever bothered to learn the difference? The cake, this showstopper I’d made with such pride, was no longer a French fancy, an elegant creation. Instead it was clearly a pink monstrosity topped off by marzipan genitalia. And the strawberries meant I never even got to taste it.