Having your Cake & Eating it!

Victoria Sandwich cake

If you have read any of the Me/Myself & I ‘blog’ stories then you will know that I have an extraordinary relationship with my childhood… Perhaps we all do? This memory came to me when I was making a large Victoria Sandwich cake for the family the other day..

I’ve never liked cakes, ever, even as a child, the very idea of putting that sickly sweet, glutenous mouthful of tacky wall paper glue into my mouth to find that it then sticks to the roof of my mouth & coats my tongue & teeth with edible adhesive .. It’s really not my thing! Agreed, not a great ‘intro’ to a story about cakes …

However I do love making cakes! Also, I’m not half bad at it! I don’t taste them, but to be fair who does taste the uncooked version of cake? I rely on a fantastic sense of smell & an overall understanding of the ingredients & the process, also I have many willing participants who taste the cakes along the way & enjoy testing the ultimate results.

My window into the world of cakes was via my mother who loves cakes & pastries, all things pretty, sweet & nice. Deserts give her great pleasure, she is a good cook herself, now in her latter years, she will happily spend a great deal of time making a good cake, she enjoys them and never puts on weight as she indulges in her home made cuisine! Having your Cake & Eating it very much apply’s to my mum … Occasionally she will ask my advice on a particular recipe. So it is something we have in common on some level.. Having enjoyed herself making a cake or four, she deposits them to grateful recipients in her local area. Often to “the old lady upstairs”, as it happens ‘the old lady upstairs’ is in fact younger than my mother, a minor point in my mothers world!

As children my parents would take my brother & I out on long drives from London to tea houses in the country; another thing I was not keen on, long car journey’s! “Are we there yet?” Arriving at these always busy tea houses crammed full of tables covered in ill-fitting over-washed table cloths, we squeezing through the packed cafe apologising to the already seated patrons to finally make our way to the empty table that beckoned us. Shunting our seats rather too tightly under the table, as we were taught to by my father, which meant that you were pinned to the table & unnecessarily close to the proceeding, in my case being small by my neck, my father was obsessed by making sure we were “tucked in tight”? He would jump up hold the edges of the chair & use his leg & knee to make sure that we were well & truly under the table, it made it impossible for me to get my hands out from under the table so that I might at some stage eat the cake I didn’t like! Parents are weird?

My parents viewed the menu, scanning the many delights of the cafe cuisine. Menu’s in those days were either typed up, carbon copy style with cross outs or tippexed where spelling mistakes were made & then attached to maroon clip boards, the clip boards had always seen better days the plastic at the edges of the board was invariably split & the battered cardboard centre was peeking through. Or the worse menu; the encapsulated plastic menu always a bit sticky & the edges were sharp, they resided in a plastic clip set in the centre of the table, sometimes you would have to prize them apart from each other in order to view. Yuck!

This was my opportunity to scan the surroundings, the decor, the people, but firstly the table were we sat at, I had made a mental note on these many visits & observed that all tea houses seemed to suffer with the same hygiene issues? Being the smallest therefore my face was the closest to the table it was obvious to me that many customers had already sat at this table prior to us. Thus the cloth was invariably covered in other peoples crumbs; which grossed me out! The table cloths were littered with bits of over toasted tea cake, small pieces of crusty toast & cake that had missed the previous occupants mouth & worse of all on occasions slimy bits of butter & jam that were smeared across the fabric. Also Gross!

In some of the more forward thinking establishments, they had a remedy to this problem, a metal tool that they would scrap across the table cloth in an attempt to collect up the debris of the now discarded bun-droppings, but all it actually did was ‘ruche’ the fabric into gathered pockets that would hide the bun-droppings underneath; so when the waitress had finished doing this piece of drama & straightened the table cloth out again you were now left with wavy lines of crumbs, more artistic perhaps, but still equally revolting!

These parlours back in the day, were mostly run by oddly shaped older women wearing frilly floral aprons tied too tightly at the waist; it did not escape my notice that these rosy-red cheeked women also had uneven floppy bosoms hanging over the their waistband, it occurred to me at the time that these ladies could do with what was a phenomenon at Grandmas house, both my aunts never stopped talking about the new revolution a ‘Playtex cross your heart bra’ this apparently according to my aunt Dilys ‘separates and lifts the breasts whilst ensuring the perfect fit’.. Regrettably this invention came a little bit late in life for Grandma & these ladies waiting the tables. Grandma was an advocate of a ‘girdle’, I only saw it once, hanging on the line, I think it was a secret, it was an odd creation with ‘dangly’ elastic hanging at the base, in later life I discovered this was a ‘suspender’, not that fashionable then, but now very Madonna or Jean Paul-Gautier, now the height of sexiness! Although Grandma was not quite that shape or possibly never had the inclination? Given the fact that she already had seven children!

My sleuthing the table cloth was interrupted by mum, “What would you both like to eat?”, she said looking at Laurie, my elder brother; she actually meant what cake do you want to eat? Any public conversation with Laurie, left him speechless. Laurie did not like to talk, he was painfully shy & introspective. I came along a number of years later & took it upon myself to talk for him, something at this stage in our lives he was mostly grateful for! Food wise Laurie mostly only liked baked beans & Arctic Roll, which was ice-cream wrapped in jam & covered in sickly sponge cake, a limited diet to be fair but it kept Laurie happy & that in turn kept my mother happy & I suffered it. I have nothing against baked beans, with the exception of having to share a room with my brother, but I detested the Arctic Roll, I would peal the sponge off & give that to Laurie & try & eat the ice-cream from inside to out so as to not have to eat any jam.

Jam, on reflection I reluctantly accepted latter in my life it was contained in my favourite biscuits which for a short while were Jammie Dodgers, I like the taste of the biscuit bit, less keen on the jam, but I would suffer it. When we moved out of London into the country my parents bought me a four poster bed, which my mother loved. Having a substantially bigger house, my mother followed in the footsteps of my aunt Elvira & took to doing large shopping visits to ‘cash & carry’, the booty was distributed all over the house, if you opened the small high level bathroom cabinet you were quite likely to be bombarded with two gross worth of coloured loo rolls or if you went ‘snooping’ about the house you could well come across an enormous amount of tins of backed beans hidden in the guest bedroom cabinets, there was ‘booty’ stashed everywhere in the house?

For some strange reason best known to my mother she would buy boxes of 24 packets of Jammie Dodgers and stash them in the void under my bed along with multi packs of tin dog & cat food. I was at this time a ‘chubby’ child, so when it came to an after dinner treat, I was allowed to take 1 biscuit from the biscuit tin in the kitchen. Except when I went to bed later, I would hang upside down on my bed & pull up the lace valiance around the bed & view the boxes of Jammie Dodgers hidden underneath. I was not a naughty child particularly at this stage of my life, but if I saw that the box had been open & a number of packets had been removed I would take a packet out & regroup with it in my bed. Having eaten with gusto 3 or 4 biscuits I would feel sick, the only problem was that I was now left with the rest of the packet. This was an issue, it was not easy to hide anything in my bedroom as my mother was constantly re-arranging furniture in there & changing the theme of my room, I would often come home to find that my draws had been riffled through & the entire contents of my bedroom had been moved to a different space. She also had a penchant to raid my bedroom cupboard & throw all the ‘stuff’ in my cupboard out onto the floor, complaining that the cupboard was a mess! Which considering she had thrown the entire contents onto the floor in a heap seemed to me to have made any mess I had made in the cupboard considerably worse? I think it was a ritual for her? So there was no other choice for me to hide my uneaten biscuits & I was forced to consume the entire packet, which made me feel extremely unwell. After a couple of attempts as stealing them it put me off Jammie Dodgers for life! Another thing my mother found issue with as she now had a stash of Jammie Dodgers I was not going to eat!

Back to the cafe table; all eyes were on Laurie’s which made his eyes water up & his cheeks go red & shinny, he was never going to talk, I knew that.. Eventually my mother would say, “Okay Laurie, you have a think about it, Natalie what would you like?” Never backward in coming forward as a child, “I want a coke & a toasted cheese sandwich, please.” My mother would sigh & ignore my request, she would then order for me & Laurie & Trevor, my father. She was always trying to control my fathers apatite, as he was a chubby, & a bit of a glutton.

I have often wondered why parents ask you what you want & then just ignore your answer & order you something entirely different? What is the point of asking in the first place? To be honest I still have these conversations with my mum now. She tells me what she thinks I will like or more to the point what I should like, be it a film or a item of clothing, I say “I don’t like it, it is not my thing!” And my mum will say, “Oh you do like it Natalie!” And so the madness goes on!

On this occasion Trevor was allowed cheese on toast a favourite of mine, Laurie would get a chocolate cake mostly or on special occasions like today a chocolate eclair & I was presented with a Battenberg cake, like it or not! A multi-coloured chess board style of cake covered in sickly marzipan. That I could cope with as Trevor mostly would scoff his food & start on mine, but what really irritated me about these dining experiences & does to this day is that Laurie was always given a coke, despite having not asking for one & I was given a bottle of congealed, split sweet & bitter tasting orange juice? Because according to my mother - ‘I liked it!’.

Battenberg, was not my style of cake, either, so my mother moved onto Meringues glued together with whipped cream, I loved the cream but the over sweet Meringues were not my thing. Mum advanced onto donuts, I didn’t mind the ‘donut’ so much despite the fact that they left your face covered in sugar & stuck your fingers together but there was that glob of jam in the middle? Pastries were mostly not my thing either, but better than cake… Mum proceeded onto home made Lemon Meringue pie, this to be fair was a little better, I could eat a bit of the lemon but not the Meringue. If you are wondering why not chocolate cake, well because I I don’t really like chocolate .. either .. I like cheese if I was to have a dessert…. So I was a lost cause to my mother. And not for the last time!

Having finally accepted that I didn’t like all things sweet mum came up with another wheeze to keep cake in my life. On the understanding that “Other people like cake Natalie”. So now it was rude for me not to accept cake! Cakes were presented to me on my birthdays they were my mothers key gifts. Between the village we lived & Windsor was a village called Datchet. …&… Joy of joy’s there was a little tea shop there called The Astricot, run by two very affable old ladies, who in fairness to them had their bosoms in the right place, perhaps they had discovered cross your heart bras? These very talented ladies created wonderful ‘early days’ themed cakes. As far as my mother was concerned it was inspired. So for the next 6 years or so, these sweet old ladies made beautiful Birthday cakes for me mostly & very occasionally for my brother, who had now been exiled to boarding school, which for me was a bit like being bereaved & for him a total disaster… The cakes were inspired, [by my mother], a Ginger Bread house with a ‘smarties’ roof, was the first, I like smarties! Some of the other themes were, a frog band cake, I am not sure why? A ballet cake covered in ballerina’s, I was not so keen on this. A cake with a glass wishing well and one covered in silk flowers to name just a few. My mother just delighted in each & everyone of them, it gave her such enormous pleasure.

The Astricot ladies were also commissioned to make various cakes for the wider family, one being for my Grandmother’s 75th Birthday that was to be held at my aunt Elvira’s house. This cake was to be the centre piece of the celebrations, well that was the view my mother had! This opulent cake was decorated in silk purple flowers, [my mother was going through her purple phase at this time, there were many design phases such she went through such as gold, lime green & her leopard pattern chapter, I will cover these in another blog!], the centre of the flowers on grandma’s cake had black & pearl wired beads as stamens, these flowers were placed delicately on scalloped white royal icing, it weight a ton. At the grand unveiling of Grandma’s cake, to my mother’s utter horror, my younger cousins dived in & started to strip the icing sugar off the cake & consume it, before we had even lit the candles. My mother was furious & I agree with her… Sometimes you can have your cake but you should not eat it … Until it has been a little bit savoured that is the point in cake it is a frivolous sexy temptress, that needs to be admired.

When I had left home, I used to make a Christmas fruit cake every year, starting the preparation nearly 9 months in advance for my mother’s celebrity friends to enjoy on her annual five month holiday in Barbados. The Christmas cake was huge, opulent & drenched in alcohol for flavour, [much like my mother’s wealthy set of friends!] Each year, the cake was sent out via couriers at Christmas to Barbados, as my mother had long since departed & there was no way that she was cutting her baggage allowance for clothes down with a big heavy cake. So the cake was dispatched along with a trolley load of ‘goodies’ purchased from Harrods, this consignment also included a stash of 20 or so cans of tinned corn beef for Alan & Ray the main hosts who despite their wealth & the luxurious surroundings liked simple fare, they also liked a quality Christmas cake. One of Alan & Ray’s guest on many occasions was Bob Monkhouse, a well known English entertainer & good friend to the Barbados crowd, his passion too was the Christmas cake, however his crime one year was to eat the last piece of my Christmas cake, so irritated was Alan that he flounced off to his bedroom & was not seen again until Bob had gone back to his own villa! It is only cake … Right!?

Don’t think that perhaps I don’t like cakes because or that I was just given badly made cakes by elderly grandparents & hapless aunts. In the main I wasn’t, my parents took us to the best patisseries in London & the home counties, plus trips to Devon & Cornwall, in their pursuits of all things cake. However, one disgusting cake memory was my grandmother’s who was a very good ‘war-time’ cook, she had a penchant for making ‘junket’, a sloppy, wobbly creation like a jelly, made from sweetened & flavoured curds of milk. Grandma would colour it in vulgar clashing vegetable dyes, to entertain her many grandchildren, 20 to be precise. Grandma made this ‘slop’ particularly for my cousin Simon as he was her favourite grandchild outside two other male grandchildren, one being my brother. We all had to suffer junket at Grandma’s gatherings most particularly because Simon liked it and we were an obedient lot!

I have continued to make many cakes & I enjoy doing it, my own children have had some spectacularly wild cakes on their Birthdays & other occasions, I have never forced cake on my children, nor did I care if they liked cake or not, they all do by the way! But what I will say is that cake making was my response in some ways to my mothers love of cake. And therefore she inspired me in some way, I hope that she will take credit in that? So on the whole has been a success… So have your cake & eating it … I suppose I should thank my mum?

Please go to Food & Entertaining …. For all recipes on making Victoria Sandwich cakes & variations …. & ENJOY >>>>