Let Them Eat Cake

Baking has grown massively in popularity in recent years thanks in no small part to the advent of the Great British Bake Off. This has led to people staging their own bake offs around the country, the rise of baking sites such as BakingMad.com spearheaded by Eric Lanlard and events such as The Cake and Bake Show in both Manchester and London that showcase to best in British baking.

The GBBO's James and Ryan

 

Walking around the packed Manchester Central at the 2013 Cake and Bake Show you can’t help but be awed by the impact that baking has had on us all. Baking trends have also become a lot more prominent, indeed you can hardly move for all the cupcakes. 

Tom Herbert's Masterclass at the The Cake and Bake Show Manchester

America have paved the way for the next baking trend that started it’s across the pond in 2012: Cake Pops. For those of you who are unsure what these little beauties are, think of a cake lollipop. 

More recently a trend that has been grabbing my attention is the cake push pop. This idea is very much like the ice cream push pop that swept the nation in the nineties but the cake push pop is less likely to give you a brain freeze. 

On the quest to try and make my very own cake push pops I enlisted my mother to help me trawl around every shop and supermarket in search of these elusive treats. Yet the push pop proved to be a bit too retro for most places and our search was fruitless until we stumbled across the Smarties ice cream of the exact description of what I was looking for in the bus station of all places. 

For the cake push pop to work best the plastic encasing should be see through, something that that push pop that I had was not. I had hoped that the blue card around the plastic case would come off leaving a clear shell but I was sadly mistaken so I was forced to abandon ship. I later learnt that I can order the case exact to my specifications off the internet. What a numpty. 

The popularity of baked goods has influenced many areas of life such as the media and even fashion.  Cake has recently taken a starring role in some photo-shoots and not just as a form of sustenance to keep the photographer, stylists and models going after a working day. This blog is a great example of cake being used to accentuate the models look. http://www.celebrationgeneration.com/blog/2010/05/03/fashion-and-cake/

At Accent Clothing (@AccentClothing) bright colours, high fashion and of course cake were the inspiration for the May look book shoot. (Baking done by yours truly)To achieve the brightness required I went through many bottles of food colouring but nothing seemed to be working, the colours weren’t vibrant enough and the cakes just tasted like the food colouring. This problem was resolved when I met colour pastes; I would only need a toothpick of the colour and not only were the cakes the right colour but also everything that I touched ended up stained.  

One of the most challenging tasks that I faced was not the making of the cakes or even the decorating of it (although that was hard) but trying to transport rainbow cupcakes and funky coloured cake pops in one piece. As I let out a sigh of relief when I delivered the cake and nothing had broken I felt like a proud mama. The cake craze is here to stay and I for one am delighted.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

The Lost Art of Letter Writing aka My Personal Homage to the Royal Mail

The advent of Skype, Facetime, WhatsApp, BBM, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, other social media that I can’t think of right now, email, texting, picture messaging, video calls and even phone calls has meant that the humble letter has fallen out of favour with pretty much everyone. The receiving of post is often limited these days to either bills, subscriptions, newsletters (although a lot have receded online now) bank statements (but even these are mostly done online) or spam. Indeed December (or even late November if you super organised) is the only month that most people will receive post (aside from birthdays but my birthday is in December so my argument is still valid) in the form of Christmas cards or Seasons Greetings if you want to be politically correct. Christmas Cards or ‘hastily signed wastes of money’ as I like to call them often provide me with a good chuckle at the lengths that people have gone to not only buy the card but also the stamps to then just sign their names under a cheesy greeting and send them to every Tom, Dick or Harry even if they haven’t talked to them in years. Why even bother sending it if you have nothing to say to the person?

However some people (especially those of the Facebook generation) are opting out of the ‘Christmas card’ phenomenon  and/or even sending birthday cards and are instead opting for sending a mundane ‘Happy Birthday x’ message on the ‘great and powerful’ Facebook instead. I must admit that I am guilty of this.

But enough about Christmas/Birthday cards what I actually wanted to talk about was the lost art of letter writing and yes let’s admit it; there is indeed an art to constructing a good letter.  

The days of pouring your life and soul onto a piece of paper or card are some people may argue well and truly over that’s what people use email or even IMing for but there’s something to be said about the way the humble letter is not instant. You have to wait days or weeks (sometimes it can even take months if the post has gone awry) for a reply, expectations tend to mount as you wait to hear from the recipient and there a few things more exciting than tearing the envelope open when what you have been waiting for finally arrives (yes I am aware that that sentence does make me sound like a rather sad excuse for a human being)

The work required in getting your hand written (or even typed) letter from A to B also seems to add to the letter writing experience. The workmanship required in not only collecting, sorting and delivering  your personal words and thoughts shows the dedication of the postal system in delivering your message even if it is a load of piffle (as my letters often are.)

The achievements and strives in modern technology have been (I won’t deny) really quite spectacular especially when you can speak to someone on the other side of the world as if they were sitting only next to you. Technology, social media and all that new-fangled stuff has brought families, friends, strangers and fangirls alike closer together through the almighty vessel of the internet and phone lines but there is only so much you can say in txt spk and even then u sound lyk an idiot.