Saturday 27 June 2015

Another Slice of Cake

A while ago I covered the wonders of cake making competitions in my home town's agricultural show. I think I forgot to mention at the time that a young woman, newly arrived in the nearby town of Yass, enquired about entering the sponge cake competition in that town's show. The comment she got in reply? "You're either very good or very brave".

Anyway, as I've never been brave or good  enough to enter such things, I have no idea whether Alice Thomas Ellis is right when she comments thus in her book Gallimaufry:

"Cake making held an inordinately important place in the cookery of the time [the writer's childhood] and there were competitions at local shows and garden parties for the finest Victoria Sponge or the lightest scone. There still are cake competitions at church bazaars, agricultural fairs, et cetera, but they have a faintly anachronistic air and I don't think passions run so high as they once did."

The intensity of imaginative effort, however misguided, displayed in the entries in Canberra Show's Gallipoli themed cakes competition suggests there may be more life left in the old dog than Ellis thought, even if is a very odd kind of life indeed:







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