Let them eat cake - as long as it’s not too complicated

Aug 29 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

NO TRICORN hats, ermine robes or suits of armour greeted me as I arrived at work yesterday morning, despite an invitation from the powers-that-be to dress in period costume.

It seemed that most people, myself included, had decided to represent the Liverpool of today, rather than come attired as King John, Our Cilla or even a Mersey Ferry.

But then I already feel as though I have taken on the mantle of a historic figure lately, and one dead celebrity is quite enough for a girl to cope with.

In this case, it is the much- maligned Marie Antoinette, whom I appear to have been possessed by.

Not that I have taken to bringing shampooed sheep to work or wearing talcum-powered hairpieces, you understand.

It is more that I seem to have adopted her immortal words “let them eat cake”.

I temporarily transformed into a domestic goddess to bake butterfly cakes for a friend’s party on Friday night (why does Nigella never accidentally rest her elbow in the butter icing?), and then I found myself helping to organise the Daily Post’s great bake-off to mark the city’s 800th birthday.

To continue the theme, I embarked on the ambitious plan to come up with a cake shaped like the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard for my boyfriend’s birthday tomorrow.

With the excitement of a five-year-old who has just been told he can have raspberry sauce on his 99 ice cream, he accompanied me to the kitchen department of John Lewis to buy some baking tins.

Armed only with a pencil sketch, drawn by one of my more creative colleagues, I was not prepared for the sight of so many choices – heart-shaped tins, square tins, oblong tins, muffin tins, Madeleine tins, non-stick tins, sticky tins, false-bottomed tins with springs, false-bottomed tins without springs . . .

Like Carrie Bradshaw suddenly finding herself in front of an Imelda Marcos shoe collection, I was transfixed, overcome with the sudden urge to spend the rest of my life baking cakes of all different shapes and sizes.

Fortunately, my boyfriend lured me away by waving a particularly nice retro kitchen timer in front of my face, and calmed my cake-crazed mind with the suggestion that the General Lee can wait for another year.

This was probably a sensible decision, as my last attempt at a novelty birthday cake was a pale green fairytale castle that I made for my sister’s eleventh birthday. It was supposed to be pastel blue, but I used yellow butter in the icing and it turned out rather differently to the photo in the book.

But then again, don’t they always?

Recipe books are a bit like mascara adverts. You know the model has been airbrushed to make her lashes look longer and thicker than those camels use to keep sand storms from stinging their eyes, but you still can’t help trying the make-up out for yourself.

Similarly, you may be aware that 27 food technicians were involved in the making of the spatchcock quail with chestnut froth and raspberry jus on a bed of wilted pak choi, but that doesn’t stop you from trying to recreate the dish with an old frying pan, a half-melted spatula and an egg slicer you were given as a wedding present.

My Mum is one of the few people I know who has managed to make the reality outdo the photo.

For my first birthday, she baked a cake in the shape of a caravan from a recipe in the Family Circle magazine.

Not just any caravan, not the infuriatingly slow sort that sends Jeremy Clarkson into a boiling rage, but a romantic Romany Gypsy caravan.

I was too young to remember it but I have never forgotten the Humpty Dumpty, fairy toadstool, butterfly and owl that followed it.

Good memories of good times, that last a lot longer than the sugar fix.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk