Sweet Tooths Inc.

It was bound to happen. In the kitchen, as with everywhere else, what goes up must come down. That doesn't just apply to soufflés. The vanilla-gilded aura that has been beaming out from the cupcake for some time now has, inevitably, begun to flicker.
When once our be-sprinkled friends could do no wrong, there are now those who mock, who jeer their admittedly absurd shoot to fame. Food blogger Sophie Jordan sneeringly dismisses them as, “the most infantile baked goods imaginable”. Even those on the opposite side of the foodie fence cant help but wonder how these souped-up little sponges found themselves, bewildered and Bambi-eyed, in centre stage. Paper cased and showcased, iced to the nines- like daughters playing gaudy dress-up in mummy’s jewellery and make-up.
Entire shops are devoted to these twee-ly glitzy calorie bombs, droves of yummy mummies, lunch-breaking nine-to-fivers, hard workers, shirkers, assistants, maids and managers can all be found frothing at the counters, as if they housed some hybrid of hyper-cute puppies, bred for ultra-adorability, crossed with syrup-dipped Chippendales.

Some cakes are verging on snacks in drag, in sickly yellows, pinks and blues, on the brink of diabetic, glitter-spewing, bright-fright meltdown.
So what’s the fuss? They’re hardly the gastronomic grail. We all see them for what they are, surely? They’re what almost every last one of us used to avidly bodge together as children, whether we were spilling the self-raising onto cracked lino kitchen surface, lurid Ikea wipe-down mats, or lacquered stretches of pine worktop, while the au-pair wiped up frantically as you went.

The only difference is, now, fully grown strangers process them in factory sterility, and demand a fiver a pop for the privilege. These little sugar-nests- they’re our own childhoods gone cooperate, siphoned straight from our fond memories and regurgitated for us in pristine Cath Kidson uniformity. And up till now, we couldn’t snaffle the things down fast enough. And I don’t think, despite the growing bake-hating, doggedly Scrooge-esque blogs such as “cupcakesareshit.tumblr.com” (yes, really), that we’re going to stop any time soon. Even if we do admit the whole phenomenon is a bit daft, actually, and any self-respecting primate, given half a dozen ingredients, bowl, spoon and oven, could whip up a batch blindfold, I’ve got a hunch that we’ll carry on investing in this sweet stuff for a little while yet.

The truth is, they’re not deemed glutinous, but just one packs more punch than necking the sugar bowl. They’re marketed as flirty and feminine, but I challenge you to find a butcher onslaught of carbs that we can chicly, smirkingly, tuck into at our desks. They float like a butterfly cake, and sting like a syringe of glucose shot straight into the veins. They’re what we craved for every time we opened our lunch boxes, and found an apple there instead.

We’re grown-up’s now, right? So we’ll have our sickly sweet, party-bag playground treat anytime we like, thanks very much.

Home on the Trains

“…And behold, as I pull this cloth from beneath the crystal and the china, in a flash! Every piece will stay intact, before your very eyes! And a one, two three…” A grassy gingham table cloth, captured mid-whip, as some vast, ethereal, velvet waist-coated magician performs to an unseen audience. Precariously, the cloth landscape holds its contents in flux, and stands on ceremony, glorious but jumbled, tentatively awaiting applause.

Flexing squares brace interlocking rectangles in a tufty, bird-pecked patchwork. Telegraph wires and electric fences guillotine the view into structure, while, behind, blossoming clouds billow out, like a child’s handwriting, innocently straying outside the lines.

As the speed picks up, eventually only smeared beams slur past the scratchy porthole- charcoal, misty dust, brown, brown, browner, quiet green, musty blue, and finally, bright. A train ride rainbow.

In the mild and towering distance, the audience beams- it’s a decorous ovation. It’s for the crowds of mottled cows, struck parallel like iron filings, it’s for the hotch-potched fields and mismatched walls, it’s for all the smirking quirks, the nonchalant oddities- it’s for our green and pleasantly surprising land.

Cookie Tin Corruption

Tesco's Espress chocolate section, and pre-chick-flick Sunday afternoon- two things that go together a bit like Rooster House and 3.30am, or John and Edward- we all know it's a daft idea, but for some reason we can't seem to help ourselves. Anyway, as I cast a calorfically ignorant eye over the rows of various colourful, glossily tempting little packets, one in particular drew me in. Surely not....yes, it seems our multi-tasking, combinationaphillia society, who squahes cameras into phones into mp3's into satnavs into cars into coffee-makers with torches and speed-dials, has just, shamelessly, crossed the final line. The line that divides simple, innocent human pleasures from the speed-snacking, efficient-eating, want-it-all-want-it-now decadent droids that have no time for a proper cup of tea and a sit-down.

There is now a chocolate bar called Galaxy Cookie Crumble, which is basically chocolate with cookie bits in. As opposed to your regular cookie with chocolate bits in, that we all know and love. Apparently double and triple chocolate cookies aren't enough anymore, and scientists have spawned this extreme superbreed of snack that overshadows the legendary cookie itself.

When once the humbly delicious cookie served us well in our peckish moments, now the chocolate has stolen the show, in an effort to combine stuff we like into a Transformers-esque idea of ultra-chocosensation. Whatever next? Will the beloved cookie become obselete, and in a few years time be nothing but a biscuit tin myth? Drastic action must be taken- buy and consume as many Galaxy Cookie Crumbles as possible. It's the only way to stop them reaching the masses, by which time it will be too late...

Lemon Baked Cheesecake- lazing on a Brummie afternoon

Spanking new spring-release tin, dodgy oven, lime green borrowed bowl and recipe book littered with patchy daubs of cakemix gone by. An hour for me, myself, and Good Housekeeping. Labrador-on-walkies levels of contentment.

Rushing and intermingling of the many various little grains, course and fine, bleached, bright and broodingly dusky. Crack and slap of egg and curd, where’s the wooden spoon, don’t forget to get the bits round the sides. Humming and stirring, a distant radio, a clatter fades upstairs. I lean against the sink meditatively, spoon to bowl, bowl to hip, spilt corn flour a shadow on my jeans, and a carefully tuned ear confirms my suspicions. Its Hugo’s room the Mcfly is coming from.

¾’s of a Gossip Girl episode and 1 pensively savoured Milkybar later, and the oven is swelling with lemony warmth. A giant coin of golden cream, a speckling Demerara blush skims the depths of glowing pudding. The buttery biscuit base holds its own, despite me having boshed the digestives in a Tesco bag after the whisk did a runner. A proud fork prod confirms it: shareable. It even looks a bit like the picture.