Get ready, set, bake!

September 21, 2014 by Ray Morgan

I blame Mary Berry for all this.

When I was younger, if my birthday was coming up I'd ask for things like cool trainers, or gig tickets.

Now I'm approaching 30, I have my eye on some seriously beautiful springform cake pans. 20cm - if you're interested.

The Great British Bake Off has truly swept the nation in the past few years, with people favouring sweet treats on a weekday evening while cosying up on the sofa judging how truly awful the crimping is on someone's pasty. I have 100% been swept up in that sugary tidal wave.

I no longer flick through fashion magazines of an evening, no, no, I'm poring over the LAKELAND CATALOGUE. I want that strawberry huller! The pineapple corer! The spray that (apparently) makes cakes slip out of their tins quicker than a granny on a frosty morning!

To use the word 'obsessed' might be strong, but sometimes when I wake up early in the morning, too early to get up but without enough time to go back to sleep, I lie there thinking about how I am going to make a salted caramel version of my flapjacks (available to buy at Elsie's Place cafe), and that now I have my extensive piping bag collection, I can really tackle the chocolate and banana muffins that I have been planning for weeks.

My friends and family are subjected to me hauling a cake to every function (whether they've asked for one or not) and I am crushed, truly crushed, when I have a baking disaster.

I tried to make some buttery biscuits from a gluten-free recipe book, and what came out of the oven was a baking sheet slick with a brown, lacy, bubbly material not dissimilar to cola-flavoured Hubba Bubba, chewed up and left over from the 90s. I slid it into the bin with a wobbly chin, thinking how ashamed Mary Berry would be of me for my failure. It really is her fault, all this.

Her lovely, twinkly, Zara-floral fault.

My top 5 cakes:
1. Chocolate eclairs. Preferably straight from the fridge. Two at a time.
2. My mum's Victoria sponge. It's a classic.
3. Flapjacks - is it wrong to put my own flapjacks in this top 5? Oh well, I just did...
4. The birthday cakes from Gilbert's bakery in Leigh. Sponge! Cream! Icing! Personalised messages!
5. The pig/frog cakes from Home Made Bakery in Leigh. So much sugar. Gngngngngngngnnnnn.