SPONGE FROM OTHERS

Cakes are best made by someone else, they just taste better that way. I have known some memorable cakes. First there was the granadilla cake that my teacher Mrs Henderson made for a primary school fête; I made my mother buy it because it looked the best and I was enthralled by the idea of granadilla icing.

I will never forget it because I never tasted it — Mum put it down for a minute and someone’s dog ate it. I really felt that Mrs Henderson was morally obliged to replace it because it wasn’t my fault, but it did not seem to occur to her: such are the Lessons in Life to be learned at primary school.

Then there was Mrs Blignaut’s jelly cake. She was my high-school friend’s mum, and her trick was a cake that intriguingly had jelly crystals in the sponge and icing. They loved that type of packet cooking in the ’60s and still do in remoter parts of the country where you can’t find crème fraîche or mascarpone for love or money.

Many years later I found the recipe somewhere and asked Food Weekly editor Hilary Biller to please make it for me; she did and it was pretty disgusting. Maybe you had to be in the ’60s.

Next was a fluffy orange chiffon cake made by Anna Scheepers, long-time president of the Garment Workers Union of SA. She was a large, tough Afrikaans woman who went into a clothing factory as a worker in the Great Depression and became a protégée of the union’s general secretary Solly Sachs — the first person to be banned in South Africa. She was an extraordinary baker when not battling for workers’ rights.

I was not, of course, deprived at home. My mother didn’t really do iced cakes but rather flapjacks on the coal stove or more traditional English fruit or pound cakes, so named because they originally had a pound of everything in them, apparently. Her favourite, and the family’s, was a simple cherry cake baked in a ring.

My own enthusiasm for baking seemed stuck on Christmas cakes for decades, then disappeared. It started with a determination to make the richest, darkest cake ever. In went molasses, chocolate, the lot. Then a friend gave me a creole Christmas cake recipe in which you soaked fruit including prunes in five liquors and Angostura bitters for months before baking it.

So the goalposts moved to the booziest cake ever, but that one had no nuts. So I re-invented it to include so many whole nuts it resembled concrete. In the end I was simply making a solid slab that was the darkest, richest, spiciest, nuttiest and most alcoholic cake ever created. The “cake” bit became incidental. I finally gave up the quest for the ultimate cake when it simply became too expensive to make, and when Eskom expressed interest in buying one in their search for alternative sources of fuel. So back to the belief that cakes are best made by someone else. In a remote village in Alsace, France, I recently tasted a slice of the local Kugelhopf, a light enriched bread baked in a swirly mould. As one does when abroad, I made inquiries about how I could make it at home, and was told that it simply had to be made in a ceramic mould bought there: the metal bunt pans would not do.

So I bought one, lugged it back home wrapped in borrowed jerseys, and presented it to the Food Weekly editor with a well-rehearsed look of helplessness. It worked like a charm — within days she arrived in the office with a magnificent Kugelhopf. I believe the recipe is in this issue, so please make it.

It’s a darned sight nicer than fruit-and-nut concrete.

I was making the most alcoholic cake ever created. The ‘cake’ bit became incidental