Generation gap a recipe for disaster for baking-challenged

My father-in-law is very fond of proclaiming brains skip a generation whenever one of his grandchildren does something clever.

In my family, it has become clear over the years the baking gene has skipped a generation.

The Teenager and her cousins were taken under my mother’s wing from a very young age and instructed in the art of baking – something my mother obviously never had time to do with her own children, as anyone who has sampled our cakes would tell you.

This can be quite frustrating as a parent, when you know any attempt to make a cake for a child’s birthday will be met by sympathy rather than gratitude.

It can be very useful at other times, when you can commission (or bribe) that child to bake goods for events and pass them off as your own in order to look good.

My own efforts have definitely improved since my Great British Bake Off obsession began, but I still don’t have “the touch” – it’s pretty much touch and go as to whether anything home-baked by my own fair hands will be edible.

Whereas the Teenager can be left in a kitchen with basic ingredients and whip up a showstopper.

This is particularly useful at Easter. While I am good at providing a roast feast, this is nothing to the gasps of appreciation that greet special cakes and biscuits in Easter shapes and colours.

Which is why I left nothing to chance this year and commissioned the Teenager in between exam revision. She finds baking stressrelieving. I find it stress-inducing.

How smug I felt when I had a frantic call from a sister who had tried to make an Easter cake herself instead of leaving it to her granny trained daughter.

“You won’t believe how much I spent on ingredients for this wretched cake,” she wailed.

“It looks unbelievably delicious and tastes completely disgusting.”

We blamed the parents.

Lucy Penman