The real food crisis isn’t soggy bottoms on Bake Off

InSPIrED by the towering cakes and moulded chocolate on the Great British Bake Off, I dusted off some self-raising flour and baked some cheese scones. Alas, the flour was old and feeble and as the smell from the oven rose, my scones sank. ‘ So what are we having then?’ said Craig, eyeing the norfolk-flat patties before I could hide them in the bin.

‘Cheese rounds,’ I said airily. ‘A bit like cheese straws. It’s a German recipe.’ This is what I miss in the Great British Bake Off: food fibbing. Sometimes recipes don’t turn out the way you expect them to but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

A bread dough of mine refused to rise despite pummelling, yeast injections and being placed on top of the radiator overnight. So I reinvented it as beer-bread by slinging a tin of beer and some baking powder into the mix and baking the shaggy batter in a cake tin. It was delicious.

Unlike Dorret Conway, there is no despair in my house if a Black Forest gateau turns into a mudslide because of an un-set mousse. You simply rebadge it as a chocolate fondant trifle and hand out spoons.

My mother is a champion repackager of baking disasters. Until I started going to school friends for tea, I believed all lemon meringue pies were meant to have a soft, chewy topping, lightly browned. Even now, I prefer it to the traditional polystyrene version.

Then there was her homemade spaghetti bolognaise: being served its cousin in an Italian restaurant was bewildering because their version was brown, not red. Apparently only my house makes spag bol with corned beef, a hearty skoosh of ketchup and a bayleaf.

Even the undiscarded bayleaf was a prized item; finding it in your dinner or your mouth was, according to my mother’s quick thinking, as lucky as finding a silver sixpence in the Christmas pudding.

And by the way, Christmas pudding should have gin poured over it and set alight, partly because one year I forgot to buy brandy.

The obsessive perfectionism of Bake Off, Master Chef and British Menus is weird. It is boutique food, made to intimidate, rather than share with friends. In Bake Off, one man, an anaesthetist, brought in one of his hypodermics to inject rose syrup into his madeira cake. I was glad he wasn’t a coroner.

It all feels a bit Marie Antoinette – except this is not so much let them eat cake, as let them watch cake.

Meanwhile, there’s a real food crisis around the corner. If the EU signs up to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, there may be small benefits for big business – but the implications of handing over control of our food to big corporations could add up to Farmageddon.

Unlike America, our dairy cows are not injected with growth hormones, our poultry doesn’t need to be washed in chlorine to render it fit for human consumption, we restrict GM crops and pesticide residues are policed. European food standards still need scrutinising, but if TTIP is imposed, the healthiest, most wholesome thing you may eat all day is a homebaked cake.