Nigel Slater's Icing on the Cake

Now, I'm no cake snob.

I'm just as happy to buy cake from a shop, as I am to eat one that

I've made at home.

Now, whether it's the Battenberg from the local supermarket,

an arctic roll from the freezer or a lovely wonky sponge

made by Auntie Marjorie, I'm drawn to them on a gut level.

They're a reminder of good times, of happy times, sharing.

Mmmm, just look at that,

light as a feather and trembling with naughtiness.

Of course, the trouble with me is I never could say no.

Cake has a universal appeal to every man, woman

and definitely every child.

For centuries, it has come to define the meaning of our most

important celebrations.

Whatever their size, shape or colour, cake has the ability to

transport us back in time.

But there's one thing that has really nagged at me over the years.

We all use the word "cake" without a

second thought, but what actually makes a cake?

Buns, pastries, turnovers, eclairs, breads and tarts.

These days, it appears anything goes.

I want to understand what makes a cake...well, a cake.

I'll be exploring the mystical ways in which a cake was placed

centre stage in some of our most ancient civilisations.

You need three young women who gather together in perfect

silence to bake a cake.

-Oh my goodness.

-Oh, I'm the queen.

And that makes me the king.

Yes, so which one of us is wearing the dress?

Finding out how they've kept a nation going

during its darkest hours.

During the war it's a survival mechanism

and keeping the home fires burning.

It's hope... This is hope in cake form.

Rejoicing in those mass produced treats that millions of us

enjoy every day...

and coming face to face with some shocking creations

that firmly take cake into the 21st century.

-Road kill cake?

-Yeah!

It's gross, it's gross. Ahh, no, no, no, no...

Do you want to eat a cigarette butt?

HE GROANS

Hello, my hobby is baking cakes,

the kind mother used to bake.

Course, I add a few modern, efficient methods of my own

and now that you're all here, I'd like to show you how I do it.

As a nation, we spend over half a billion pounds a year

on home baking!

It seems we have this unquenchable appetite for anything naughty...

but nice.

So, when exactly is a cake a cake?

The question that can lead to people getting quite hot under the collar.

I mean, does it have to be round? Must there be a raising agent?

Will it go stale if left too long?

And as with an Eccles cake or

a teacake, if it has the word in its name,

does it necessarily qualify it?

Before we go into the finer detail, I've been invited to a select

and secret gathering of people who love cake nearly as much as I do.

-Hello.

-Hello, Nigel, welcome to the Clandestine Cake Club.

Thank you very much.

It's nice to be able to surprise people with cake

'and it's something that you've created as well'

and then seeing everybody get stuck in and enjoy eating it.

When I bake, it always just takes me

'back to those sort of earlier days with my mum.'

I think bakers as a group are actually naturally quite

generous people.

I think it's about making other people and myself happy.

That's my lavender, lemon and blackberry bun.

-Lavender, lemon and blackberry.

-A bit of a mouthful.

You haven't a cake, really...

With over 13,000 club members worldwide, I'm curious to know

why they chose the word "clandestine".

I love the idea of getting people together over tea and cake.

We would book a place and only a few days before would you know

exactly where the event is, so the Clandestine Cake Club was created.

-I've heard of things like that but I'm not sure it was cake.

-Ah!

Perhaps I shouldn't say it, but there is something a little...

eccentric about a club

where people bring cakes. I mean...

It's the only place in the world where it's socially acceptable to

sit down and eat cake all afternoon and nobody will bat an eyelid.

People share love of movies and sports teams and whatever,

why can't people share love of cake?

At the end of the day the people who do find us

a tad eccentric still eat our cake if we give them a slice.

"Yes, you're mad, but can I have second slice?" Yes.

Heavens, I adore Mary Berry and I'd go out with Sue Perkins

in a heartbeat but we have put a lot of pressure on home baking.

This idea that things should be perfect and one of the great joys

of coming here is realising that a cake doesn't have to be perfect.

You haven't got to worry about the edges being straight,

you haven't got to worry about whether it's risen properly.

You certainly don't have to worry about a soggy bottom.

This is cake to be enjoyed. It's made with love,

it's made for sharing. This is just the most wonderful,

wonderful thing, that this exists...a club for cake.

Cake is now so much a part of our daily lives, it feels that

it's been around since the dawn of time.

Whilst the word itself can be traced back

to the 11th century Nordic word "kaka",

the first actual evidence goes back to prehistoric times.

Cake historian Nicola Humble has invited me for afternoon tea,

Neolithic style, in order to sample some of man's earliest cakes.

Nicola, tell me about the first cakes.

I mean, what shape were they, what sort of size?

The first cakes that archaeologists tend to refer

to as cakes are Neolithic.

Clearly, Neolithic man didn't necessarily call them cakes,

but they call them cakes because they are round

and they're flat and they're basically grey and moistened,

crushed and compacted together in some way.

And then cooked possibly on stones by the side of a fire in the ashes.

So, what they're like, essentially, you take grains like this, crush

them with the corn, stick them together somehow,

they're rather like some of these foods.

-Rice cakes, for instance.

-Good old rice cakes.

A rice cake is a cake for exactly the same reason,

because it's compacted together.

We think of a cake of soap or mud caked on your boots,

it's the same usage.

So, it seems to me, that's the earliest understanding

of what a cake means, is things

squished together into a sort of patty-like form.

So, Nicola, tell me about the bowl of muesli.

Porridges of oats or wheat, get things added into them

throughout the Middle Ages and onwards.

So, dried fruits?

Dried fruit, honey, it gets thicker and thicker and thicker over

the centuries until it reaches the point where someone, probably

several people, realised that they could put it in a cloth and boil it.

And at some point someone, instead of boiling it, they bake it.

In essence, these disparate crushed ingredients went from being boiled

in puddings to being baked,

moving us one step nearer to the modern cake.

And we can find the roots of that in later cook books

because many early fruit cakes are referred to as plum pudding cakes.

Yes, you could, in theory, actually, you know,

pat this into a little shape and bake it.

-Yes, absolutely.

-It would squish together.

-Absolutely.

And there you've got something that, for me,

-is on the way to being a cake.

-Yes.

From these primitive examples of compacted ingredients,

the notion of a cake as we know it today was still some way off.

But one thing that has been consistent from the get-go is

the way in which they've always been intimately associated with

rituals and celebrations.

I've been invited to an ancient grotto...

Hello, welcome.

..to meet Ronald Hutton, professor in British folklore and pagan ritual

at the University of Bristol.

So, tell me, why does cake lend itself so perfectly to the ritual?

Cake is simply the most exciting form of bread

and for thousands of years since the New Stone Age,

when farming was discovered, down to the modern period and we got

things like potatoes, bread was the staple diet of Europeans.

And cake is simply the most interesting thing

you can do with a bread mix.

SINGING

So, tell us about Anglo Saxons and their relationship with cake.

The pagan Anglo Saxons built

one of their great annual religious festivals around cake.

We know this because Bede, the first great historian of the English,

an Anglo Saxon monk, said that they called February "Solmonath",

cake month, because then they baked cakes

and offered them to their gods.

Now, I've been hearing about something called "dumb cake",

what is this?

It's a ritual for young women,

when marriage was absolutely crucial for the future of most young women.

And so you need three young women who gather together in perfect

silence to bake a cake.

If they've done everything correctly and without any of them speaking

a word, then they'll dream of their future husband

and know exactly who he's going to be.

How exciting!

It happens in October,

on the eve of Saint Faith, which is the fifth of October.

Here's the rhyme that goes with the baking.

I'll do it in a West Country accent,

cos it's from the West Country and I'll try and be innocent.

"Good saint faith be kind tonight and bring to me my heart's delight.

"Let me my future husband view and be my vision chaste and true."

-Isn't that beautiful!

-Yes.

So, where does the Twelfth-Night cake fit into all this?

It comes out of late medieval France where they had the idea,

which I must admit is rather a good one,

of picking somebody to rule over the festivities that end

the 12 days of Christmas on Twelfth Night by choosing them by lot.

But the exciting way they do it, instead of just drawing things

out of a jar or flipping a coin, is to bake a cake with a bean in it.

And the guy who gets the bean becomes the king for the night

and everybody has to obey him.

And there's also a pea baked in the cake

and the lady who gets the pea becomes the queen for the night.

Obvious question, what happens if the guy gets the pea?

Well, there are a number of solutions possible to this,

one being for him to put on a dress,

another being for him simply to choose

the lady who is the queen, which is the gallant way of doing it.

Ah, ha-ha-ha!

Oh, my goodness!

-Oh, I'm the queen. That was good, wasn't it, first time?

-Yes.

-Oh, look there he is.

-Yes.

-Look at that!

-And that makes me the king.

Yes, so which one of us is wearing the dress?

-It's your choice.

-Dress.

Piece of cake for you.

Thank you. This shoot has actually turned out to be fun.

This is the fruit cake that gave birth to all fruit cakes.

Wonderful!

But hang on, we've leapt centuries from ancient Britain to what

is essentially a Christmas cake without icing.

Up until the Elizabethan era,

breads and early cakes were made using yeast

or something called ale barm...it's a yeasty by-product of cider.

It wasn't until the early 17th century, with the discovery of

using whipped egg whites as

a raising agent, that anything resembling the tall sponge cake

we know today started to emerge from the manor houses of the rich.

What would the King make of this new type of cake...

this daring cook's experiment.

The cook had gambled...and won!

Here was history in the cake making.

The ability to whisk eggs brought about a revolution in cake making,

and by 1615, with the publication of what is widely regarded as

the first sponge recipe by Gervase Markham,

the modern cake was born.

What is rather surprising, however, is just how long it took us to

find the right tool for egg whisking.

I'm heading to Audley End House, in Essex, to meet an expert in

the history of kitchen technology.

Bee, how important is the evolution of kitchen technology to

the evolution of the cake?

It was hugely important.

If you think of the basic ingredients of what

we would think of as being just a kind of all-purpose sponge cake...

sugar, butter, eggs, flour.

Those have been around for a really long time,

those were easily accessible to the medieval cook.

What wasn't available to them

was any of the things that you would have needed actually to make a cake.

Ranging from an oven with regulated heat,

a whisk for beating the eggs.

Even more basic than that,

ready-ground flour and ready-ground sugar.

I mean, I view ready-ground sugar as being a far greater

labour-saving device than ready-sliced bread,

which you hear people say, "The greatest thing sliced bread".

I think it's the greatest thing since ready-ground sugar,

which only came into people's lives in the late 19th century.

Before that you'd had these vast cones of solid sugar ranging in size

from five pounds up to 40 pounds, which you'd have to hack away at

yourself and then pound in a series of pestles and sieve through sieves.

Well, who has time to do that?

The result being that if you wanted a cake the odds were that

you would be very rich to be able to make it.

You'd have to have an array of servants who could

beat your eggs for you.

I mean, I came across this 14th century recipe for pancakes even.

I think of pancakes as being pretty quick.

"You've got to beat the batter long enough to weary one person or two."

You've just got these people lined up,

OK, this person's tired out, we'll get the other person in.

Human egg beaters!

How did we start that and where did this come from?

The most basic was just a stick.

Oh, for heaven's sake!

It would take a while, wouldn't it?

You would be stuck there for quite some time, I think.

And then there's the fork, which arrived in Britain from Italy

and people were very suspicious of at first

and it's mainly viewed now as an eating utensil.

But then the other option people had is just twigs.

It's a great sound.

You know that you're getting air into there,

you can feel it going in.

You can see it changing, the structure is already changing.

-I'm loving this!

-Yeah.

Another thing that's lovely about the twig whisks is that

people would sometimes use them to flavour the eggs at the same time.

So, they might use stripped down peach twigs to impart

a flavour of bitter almonds.

Oh, like an early way of adding essence to something?

-Hmmm. There you are, look.

-I'm there!

-You're not far off.

So where did we go then?

Well, then we got to this, the first visual record of this is in 1570.

They're great, aren't they?

As with all technological innovation there are boom years.

Between 1850 and 1920,

692 individual patents were

registered in America for a multitude of

various whisks, many of which caught on here in the UK.

One such tool was this.

This was called the Dover.

I think a lot of us

have Proustian memories of making cake with Mum using one of these.

-Yeah, this is Mum's, I can see her now, doing this!

-Yes...

-but it took a long time.

-"Mum, can I have a go, can I have a go?"

-Yes!

And that wonderful thing when she'd let you have a taste of the mixture.

Whisk them up until they're really stiff and fluffy.

Remember, two tablespoons full of caster sugar to every whisked

egg white and you whisk it up so stiffly that it shouldn't fall out.

It was a very pleasant surprise to discover this again.

It was like finding an old childhood friend.

This whisk, or one rather like it, was what got me

first interested in cooking.

Mum would be making butterfly cakes

and all the time I'd be saying, "Mum, can I have a go?

"Can I have a go, please?!"

I used to love using it.

I liked the sound it would make and if you were really clever it

used to make lots of mess as well, if you took it out of the bowl

and still carried on whisking and covered everything in cake mixture.

And little bits of mixture would get trapped inside

and you could get them out with your finger and eat them.

During the 17th century, with sugar increasingly available to bakers,

us common folk could now sample baked treats on the streets.

They still weren't what you or I might recognise as cake.

They weren't much more than sweetened breads, but as with

all things indulgent and slightly naughty, puritanical Britain

considered these early treats heretical,

a threat to common decency.

Master Brewster, be warned, the King of England knows of your sins!

So, the first, sort of, British cake that I would recognise...?

-This, really.

-The bun.

-The bun.

During Elizabeth's reign, puritans

introduced a series of laws

forbidding the sale of fruited and spiced bread or buns,

except on religious occasions.

And so you were allowed to serve, you know,

these evil buns at Christmas, at funerals and on Good Friday.

Now, some food historians believe that before this date it was

usual to cut a cross in all baked goods,

in order, it is said, to let the devil out.

And so the cross for Good Friday then survived,

sort of, partly in response to that tradition, but partly cos it's

the only day it's really appropriate to use the cross, as a symbol.

Are you seriously suggesting that buns were banned?

Yes, absolutely!

Certain sorts of buns.

-Yes, frivolous buns...sexy buns.

-Frivolous buns, sexy buns?

Yes, it's pleasure!

You know, like, circuses and recreational sex and plays.

They were all things that were frowned upon and legislated against.

That's why we know, why historians know, about these

various measures because there were very specific laws, often

local laws, forbidding the sale of goods like this.

I mean, it's just bread with fruit in it.

Yes, but the fruit is expensive, it's luxurious,

as are the spices, as is the sugar.

They're all unnecessary.

-And this was supposed to ignite our passions, was it?

-Yes.

Rather have a bun.

There's a naughty habit, haha!

You see, naughty...habit, no?

Well, please yourselves.

Fresh cream cakes - naughty...

# But nice! #

The idea of cake as a guilty pleasure has been around for

centuries, which makes me wonder, could guilt be a defining

feature of what makes a cake?

Are we all simply hard-wired from birth to over indulge in

sweet things?

I'm hoping a session with a bio-psychologist will help me find

out if my desire to eat as much cake as possible isn't in fact my fault.

Marion, is there any real science behind indulgence?

Well, I suppose the science of indulgence involves the

science of pleasure and trying to

look at what people find pleasurable.

And everybody's history is different and everyone's culture dictates what

is pleasurable, what is meant to be eaten under certain circumstances.

So, indulgence to me suggests eating perhaps too much and I think that

in our culture at the moment we're very worried about over indulgence.

And, certainly, it's a fine line, isn't it, between having a treat,

having an indulgence and having too much of a good thing.

Marion, what, for you, are some of

the defining features of the human appetite?

The human appetite arises because we need to eat.

So, there's a homeostatic need to eat but, of course,

we also eat for pleasure.

So, we have homeostatic and hedonic features of appetite.

What are some of the earliest triggers for eating in youngsters?

Infants are prepared to have milk upon birth.

So, we share this ability to be

adapted to milk with other mammals

and because milk is slightly sweet we have an innate liking for sweet.

So, we don't have to learn about sweetness, we couple sweetness,

therefore, with pleasure and with fondness of our mother's memory.

So, there's a kind of way in which we're connecting back to

human milk when we're thinking about sweetness.

Whereas other tastes have to be aware and you might indulge

because you don't feel so good

and actually bringing sweetness to the fore brings back good memories,

happy memories, even from the time of birth.

Baking cakes and eating cakes, which are very sweet, will evoke

memories that are very positive and sharing and baking

and all the fun that you can have in the kitchen.

There's a novel cooking contest,

where the boys do all the work.

75 couples took part in the contest, all baking the same cake.

Careful now, Edward, don't you spill any of that yolk.

Whereas most people learn to cook alongside their mums

in the kitchen, my introduction was at school.

You know, I was never really very good at science at school,

it just wasn't my subject, along with maths.

But I did like the idea of domestic science and so much so

that I asked the headmaster if I could do it.

"Can I do cookery?" And they let me.

Slow-cooking can be done in an electrical crock pot,

but only one dish can be done per crock pot.

We made scones, we made jam, we made stew,

we even made our own Christmas cake and I loved the domestic bit.

I'd go home on the school bus with all the things I'd made.

The jam, the big flask of stew, the Christmas cake...

and if the boys made fun of me

they stopped as soon as I opened my cake tin and got out the scones.

I didn't get the science bit.

I missed out what it was that made that cake rise, why it worked?

I think it's about time I found out.

Now for our ingredients.

Flour, right here, in the sugar can.

Now, we'll need eggs...

HE HUMS

..strictly fresh.

I'm going back to school for a lesson with the physicist

Peter Barham, who has a major obsession

with the science of baking.

Peter, I'm one of those cooks that doesn't really measure things.

I tend to throw things in and cook, I suppose, by instinct.

The only time I really measure things is when I'm baking.

Now, you've written a book on the science of cooking.

Why not just cook?

Why not just bake?

First of all, if you're going to make a cake that's going to blow up,

you've got to make something to blow up.

Think of a rubber balloon, so you've got to make something

like a rubber balloon, that you can inject gas into,

so it blows up. That's what you're making.

So, to make that you've got to have sheets, which are somehow rubbery,

and then you've got to make sure

those sheets are almost solid afterwards.

When you cool it back down, you don't

want the cake just to fall back down to nothing.

Eggs, basically, provide the protein,

which cross-links when it's being cooked.

The starch gives it strength,

so if you want to support a filling or a top,

you've got to have some structure, some strength in it.

The starch is mainly doing that.

It's a scaffolding for the rest of it.

The fat adds a bit of flavour and texture

and it reduces the rate at which your cake will go stale.

So I'm going to put a little bit of baking powder in here.

This is a key part of how much you put in, though, because that's

going to have a really big effect on how fast the cake is going to rise.

So this is probably the single most important ingredient to

measure accurately.

Now, I'm going to sieve this.

Yeah, it does look nice, doesn't it?

You get the snow coming in like that, yeah.

I enjoy sieving flour.

Yes, why do you sieve it?

I feel that it makes the mixture lighter

because it's taking the air with it as it goes down, is that rubbish?

When I was a kid I remember my mum going to the grocers

and getting flour and the grocer would go into a big sack with

a cup and put it into a brown paper bag and give it to her...

along with anything else that was in the big sack.

-Yeah, sure.

-So you sieve it to get those other things, weevils,

mouse droppings, or whatever they may be, out of the flour.

So, that's the real reason why you were sieving flour, to remove

extraneous matter that might have got in there.

-So, this is a pointless exercise for me?

-Pretty much, yeah.

Sometimes I don't want a fresh egg.

If I'm making meringue, I find that slightly older ones give me

-a better meringue.

-OK...they're thinner.

A fresh egg is quite a different beast from an older egg.

When people originally wrote the recipes, the eggs would almost

certainly have come from the chickens in the garden.

Very thick, viscous eggs which have quite a different behaviour.

OK, the longer you leave this, of course,

because it's acting, the baking powder's going off.

Now, you're losing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,

the less it's going to rise in the end.

So, science is happening already.

My stepmother used to make the most wonderful, light Victoria sponges.

I use butter but she used to make them with soft margarine

and they used to rise much, much better than mine do.

Why was that?

With butter you get the flavour of butter, that's obvious,

but the water content, because butter is quite hard

when it's in the fridge, is actually lower than you'd get in most

margarines that spread quite easily from the tub.

So, you've got more liquid fat and you've got more water in there.

So, that water turns to...steam?

-Turns to steam.

-Makes it rise.

So, I'm going to pop these in the oven.

My little sponges...they look good.

-Yup...you notice they've domed in the top.

-Yes.

What sometimes happens is they will collapse

-and leave a dent in the middle.

-Oh, been there.

Right, fine, if you want to stop that happening,

after you've taken it out of the oven just drop it and what happens is

the reason it will collapse in the middle is that you've got

the bare bubbles of air expanded and as they collapse back down again

because the air, the gas, reduces in volume, it dips in the middle.

And the reason it's the middle is because the outside, out here,

has been hotter than the inside so it's cooked more, it's stiffer.

The middle is softer.

So, if you drop it you break the walls of all those bubbles

and air can just come back in.

You want me to drop my cake?

Yeah, drop your cake, yeah.

Now, that one should collapse less than this one...you haven't dropped.

And do you know what?

If you look closely, Peter's science know-how really has improved

the top half of my Victoria sandwich.

The bottom bit down there, you can see it's collapsed a bit down there.

-You can see where the cake has collapsed...

-Yes!

..gone all soggy and that's the one we didn't drop,

the one we did drop hasn't done that.

Drop your cake!

There's a four-course meal cooking at

the Gas Research and Training Centre in Fulham, London.

Combustion tests, for which gas samples are collected and

chemically analysed, complete a check-up which ensures that what's

cooking really cooks.

Of course, one of the most significant moments in baking

any sweet treat, where the magic happens, or perhaps where it

goes wrong, is popping your cake mix into the oven.

From the earliest stone ovens of the Greeks through to

the controllable gas oven at the turn of the 20th century...

the fate of

the cake was inextricably entwined with the evolution of the oven.

Only once we could control our heat, would cakes become ever more

experimental and adventurous.

The tiny flame will keep your meal hot

and perfectly succulent for much longer than normal.

What, no cinders and wife beating?!

Ta...not with this!

I can't think of a more welcoming smell on earth than a house

with a baking cake in the oven.

You open the door and that

buttery, sugary, rich smell

of something just pottering away and it'll be ready soon.

An English tea party is always a pleasant occasion,

especially when the company's so superbly well-mannered.

A key reason cake became an important part of the British

mindset was to do with its relationship with tea.

I wonder whether the definition is as much about its social role

as how it's made.

During the late Victorian era and well into the 20th century,

the tea shop became a familiar feature

on virtually every high street.

Lyons were the market leaders.

Whilst their first tea shop opened in 1894,

by the 1930s there were hundreds of them.

And we're not talking about twee little tea shops

like the retro ones springing up everywhere today.

No, tea shops back in the '20s, '30s and '40s

were vast department store-sized venues

serving hundreds of customers a day.

I'm going to have tea and cake with someone who believes the historical

image of the quaint tea room needs a good kick up the backside.

So, Annie, the rise of the tea room.

-Did this come directly from afternoon tea?

-Not really.

Afternoon tea is important.

It's a good excuse for why people would visit tea rooms,

but they're much, much more than that.

They're places of sociability, of female sociability.

So you had the male coffee shop in the 17th and 18th century

and the tea rooms is really the female equivalent of it

in the 19th century.

And, of course, that means women are discussing the topics

important to them, female suffrage, the vote.

It's very easy for us to see them as very cosy, very nice, quite twee

places, but actually the tea rooms is quite a subversive type of thing.

Then the really big boom period for tea rooms is the 1920s to 1930s,

the inter-war period, when women are going out to work,

where there's an awful lot of social change afoot. They've won the vote.

And these now are forums for all sorts of sociability

and the tea rooms then has evolved from being quite

so subversive to being somewhere that actually it's still

about women, but the main thing is that it's there for you just to

have something comforting, nice and above all else, utterly feminine.

So all of these cakes,

-they're really rather delicate and they're quite small.

-Yes.

You'd get big cakes served in things like servants' halls,

so lower down the social scale where... It is, let's face it,

more of an effort to make individual cakes and they do look nicer,

but they are all small, they are all very individual.

They're not like the modern cupcake which is not a small cake at all.

It's a huge, horrible leviathan of horrible oily mess

with butter cream goo everywhere masquerading as a small cake,

whereas actually most cupcakes would feed four quite happily.

But if you look at things like the classic Victoria sandwich,

-one of those isn't going to kill you.

-No.

It's very delicate, it's very, very good with tea.

It's quite bland and yet, at the same time,

it's got the flavours that will complement delicate teas.

-It's not strong.

-I'm taking one.

Yeah, absolutely.

Whichever the social level that you're looking at,

the cake and the tea are very much together.

So something like the seed cake, which is this one,

you might well find a basic seed cake using lard instead of butter,

using caraway seeds, using fairly cheap ingredients,

in a fairly basic tea rooms.

This one has got butter in instead of lard.

It's got a bit of brandy in. It's a slightly higher grade of seed cake.

So you might find it in quite a posh tea rooms,

but you'll also find it at the bottom.

These ones are chocolate cakes, but in true Victorian fashion,

they've got to be tarted up a little bit.

You've got queen cakes here.

These ones were very, very popular really from the 18th century onwards

and they're a basic sponge but with rose water in and currant

and they're nearly always made in little heart-shaped

or other shaped moulds as well.

You've got jubilee teacake. This is one of my favourites.

I've never heard of a jubilee teacake.

This one is a flourless cake and it's got a tea glaze on it

so it really brings out the tea flavours.

And, of course, that one is a very refined cake

that you have to eat with a cake fork.

-This is delicious.

-I quite like the mixture of the pistachio nuts

and the coconut with it.

So it wasn't just individual tea shops?

I remember two specifically -

the ABC and Lyons Tea Rooms.

And they really became a sort of phenomenon in and of themselves,

especially Lyons, who had both the normal ones

and also the corner houses, the slightly posher ones.

And they were, both of them, they were huge empires of tea rooms

and they really are completely an establishment.

'But the outbreak of World War II changed everything

'in the cake tins of the nation.'

-ARCHIVE NEWSREEL:

-Another instalment of cuts and restrictions has been

announced and will shortly come into force.

'No, I haven't been taken prisoner of war.

'Annie wants to test my taste buds with some austerity cakes.

'She's baked these with rationed ingredients that would have

'been used during World War II.

'My task? To guess the unlikely ingredients.'

Right, so this is the first cake.

And this feels rather like a fruit cake.

It tastes like the fruit cake you get on trains.

I call it railway cake.

That's a fruit cake.

-Austerity fruit cake.

-This one is a dripping cake.

So it is a fruit cake and it's effectively a rich fruit cake.

-So was lard rationed?

-Yes, all fats were rationed.

This one.

Now this isn't the nicest cake I've ever eaten.

I'm not even sure it is cake.

It really isn't very nice.

I don't like it, I'll tell you that.

It's a potato cake and it's cooked on a griddle

so that's one of the reasons it's so flat,

but it's mashed, effectively mashed potato with sugar and fruit.

We've got one more to try.

They're not very light, these, are they? Let's be honest.

I don't want to eat another piece.

Right, we have nothing more to taste so you can take your blindfold off

-and see the beauties that you've just not actually scoffed.

-Right.

Oh, well, they look pretty good.

-They do look like cakes.

-They do.

If you put that in front of me I'd be happy with that. Look at that?

That one I think came out the best, undoubtedly, but then that's

a very early recipe and as rationing got progressively deeper,

and as the food supplies ran out, of course,

more and more expedients were necessary.

-You cannot waste it.

-No, you really, really can't.

You're not going to waste something that big.

You're going to recycle it into a pudding.

You're going to cover it with a bit of jam.

'With rationing, innovation in the kitchen reached an all-time high.

'Carrots, parsnips and powdered eggs became staple ingredients.

'The dark colour of gravy browning made cakes look richer and in

'some cases paraffin fuel was used as a fat replacement.'

In what ways did wartime food writers and cooks innovate?

They really just had to eke things out in a way

they hadn't done before.

The innovation is in substitutions, eggless, fatless walnut cake.

You know, flour, walnuts, milk, sugar, baking...

A lot of use of baking powder in these

because you've got to make things rise somehow and there are no eggs.

And actually that's another thing, fuel is rationed,

and everything, everything has to be calculated to the nth degree.

There's a strong emotional attachment that we have to cakes.

-Does it come from here?

-I think in a lot of ways it does, yes.

Obviously we've eaten cake for a very long time, it's 400 years,

if not before, but I think during the war it's a survival mechanism.

That aspect of cake-making really does come forth in the war

in a way that it hasn't before.

They're about feeding children, feeding your neighbours.

You're doing it for the good of the nation. It's not a selfish thing.

It's about surviving and keeping the home fires burning.

It takes on a significance that it didn't have before.

It's hope. This is hope in cake form.

Like the baking innovations of wartime rationing, the vast range

of regionally baked treats on offer in Britain proves true the idea

that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

Over the years we've created countless tasty treats

with weird and wonderful names.

Rutland plum shuttles.

A Bolsover cake.

Suffolk forces cake.

A Selkirk bannock.

Yorkshire parkin.

A Norfolk vinegar cake.

Singing hinnies.

Chorley cakes.

Cumberland courting cake.

And a Dorset cider cake.

I've been sent to Coventry to meet a specialist in regional cakes.

Whilst the city may have lost much of its architectural heritage

in World War II, this, the Coventry God cake,

is a tradition the Blitz couldn't wipe from the map.

This has been around in history for about 500 years.

It pre-dates the Reformation

and we're sitting here in a Holy Trinity Church because this triangle

represents the Holy Trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So why does it smell of Christmas?

Because it contains what we now think of as Christmas mince.

A rich, fruity alcoholic mixture

and it was traditionally given by godparents to godchildren

as a blessing at New Year.

Ah, I see.

And one of the things that the children were supposed to do was

bite off each corner in turn

and say, "God, the Father, God, the Son and God, the Holy Spirit."

NIGEL SIGHS

And then they were blessed, presumably for the rest of the year.

I'm not sure about the name, cake.

This to me is a pastry.

Yes, you could call it a turnover, if you wanted to, in modern parlance,

but I think probably what happened was that,

back in the day, everybody had bread

and then on high days and holidays

they might have put spices in it or they might have put fruit in it.

It was a real celebration to put fruit in a bread

and that may be why they started calling it cake.

I don't know, because cake means all sorts of different things in different places.

I'm beginning to think

that the moment we started to use bread in a celebratory way

and started adding fruits,

that's when the name cake seemed to creep in.

It makes sense, doesn't it, to make that distinction?

Bread is an everyday thing, cake is a celebration.

Why is that Britain has so many regional cakes?

One of the reasons things emerged where they did

is the nature of the soil, the nature of the farming that went on.

For example, in Wiltshire and in other pig raising country,

you have this wonderful thing called lardy cake.

Oh, lardy cake.

-Lardy cake.

-Yes, please.

-And it's because people raised pigs and when,

in the autumn you killed the pig, salted it away

so you had meat during the winter, you had lard

and so you have a lardy cake in pig country

and then you have this wonderful thing called the Yorkshire curd tart

up in North Yorkshire, in dairy country,

where the curds are a by-product of the dairy industry and making cheese.

The curds are left over from your cheese making,

do something with them.

-Recipes used to be very practical, didn't they?

-Yes.

There really is a sense of why things became the way they are.

The reason we have oatcakes in the North of England and in Scotland

is because the weather was too bad for a more delicate crop like wheat.

So you grow oats and what goes into the flour is oats,

therefore that's what goes into biscuits and cakes.

How about this? The Cornish heavy cake.

CAROLINE LAUGHS It's name does it no favours, because it's not a heavy cake,

it's a "hevva" cake, from the Cornish.

It goes back to the days of pilchard fishing, of all things,

in Cornwall, where somebody used to stand on the cliff top,

he was called a huer and when he saw fish, he raised a hue and cry.

And he would call out "Hevva"

when he saw the dark shadow of a school of pilchards under the water.

And that was the indication to the fishermen

that they should go over and drop their nets

in this particular place,

but because it was loud enough

for the women folk back in the village to hear,

they knew that their men folk

would be back for supper sometime quite soon.

So they threw together this really quite quick and easy cake,

which as you see is a not very risen, fruity thing

and it's scored on the top in the pattern of a fishing net.

So, we've got a lot of things that we call bread,

thinking of tea breads and this, the lovely bara brith.

It's good, isn't it?

Mmm. It is.

I sometimes think

when people are having a really important meeting,

something really crucial, maybe even something international,

I think we should bring out some cake.

You can't be fighting when you're eating a lardy cake.

In fact, with a lardy cake,

you can hardly be talking, it's so chewy,

but you certainly can't be creating an international incident.

NIGEL LAUGHS

'There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

'she had so many kids she didn't know what to do,

'so she went to the shop for Mcvities bar cakes.

'She knew there were a dozen things she could make.'

For hundreds of years,

baked treats in all their glorious diversity

have been baked in homes across the country.

But by the late 19th century, with increased mechanisation,

things started to change.

A Scottish marmalade manufacturer

created Britain's first mass-produced Dundee cake.

Other bakeries followed suit and in 1927 the world of factory-made cakes

was set alight when the first Jaffa Cake

rolled off the production line.

And no, it's not a biscuit.

It's been legally defined as a cake.

And I don't wish to discuss it any further.

By the 1960s,

helped by the scientific developments in ingredients

and preservatives, factory-made cakes flooded the market.

The UK's major baking firms, McVities, Mr Kipling, Lyons, Hovis

and McDougall, started to produce

all manner of slices, bars and loaves.

Whilst McVities diversified into fruit cake, mini rolls, and

Jamaican ginger cake, Mr Kipling, founded in 1967, gave us a plethora

of tarts, pies and, most famously, the Battenberg and French fancies.

Even Cadbury's muscled in, giving us the chocolate Mini Roll in 1962,

a product that is now Britain's number one cake snack.

Since then, almost every single supermarket has crowded in,

producing their own tailored versions of such classics

as Madeira, Genoa, lemon drizzle, cherry sponge and coffee and walnut.

Amazingly, just this cake, loaf and slice section of the market

has mushroomed from being weird, wonderful and new in the 1970s,

into a business that is now worth a whopping £1.6 billion a year.

You see, I'm sorry, but for me, the shop-bought Battenberg

has just as much magic about it as the original

created in 1884 to celebrate Prince Louis of Battenberg's marriage

to Queen Victoria's granddaughter.

Now, I love a home-made cake or something from an artisan bakery,

but they're not the cakes I grew up with.

So they haven't got that lovely ingredient of nostalgia.

I don't smell them and go back to when I was seven or eight or nine.

This was the stuff that I grew up with.

So, I've got little fondant fancies,

the little chocolate covered Swiss rolls,

and, best of all, the Battenberg.

This is the cake I really loved.

It's so cute, it's so pretty and it looks quite complicated to make.

Two colours held together with jam and then wrapped in almond paste.

Makes me happy just to look at it.

"Friday," wrote Mr Kipling, "a fancy dress party for my nephew

"for which I created something rather fancy,

"my exceedingly delicious French fancies..."

These cakes have got something very, very special,

because when I smell them,

it's like smelling my childhood, but the good bits of it.

What's missing here are the garish colours.

The food police have taken all the fun out of these.

They're not as bright, they're not as jewel-like,

although they're probably a little bit better for you.

Can't say a lot for them. The sponge is very bland.

It's so sweet, but what comes with them

is all those wonderful memories.

It's a little feast of nostalgia.

# Just like a man

# You give him a break

# And you wind up in the kitchen

# Baking a cake... #

The baking of cakes has always been very firmly established

as a woman's job.

The ultimate expression of being a good housewife

was producing an endless supply of baked perfection.

But this love affair with sugar and butter can come at a price.

With the average bakery cupcake

containing approximately 500 calories, it's safe to say that

whilst these baubles of the cake world may look nice,

not only are they bad for our teeth and waistline,

they're probably bad for our life expectancy too.

As an antidote, I'm hooking up with someone who,

despite being named after a particularly sweet treat,

is a self-confessed hater of all cakes and an outspoken feminist.

Beautifully poured.

Would you like a piece of cake?

Nigel, it's so kind of you.

There are many reasons why I'm going to spurn your offer.

One is that I'm too fat for cake, two, I don't actually like cake.

-You don't like cake?

-I don't have a sweet tooth,

I have a sour tooth to go with my personality.

When I was very young, I was greedy, like all children are,

and I liked cake, and I liked cake a bit too much,

and by the time I was nine, I was quite chubby

and then as a teenager I was even more aware of my chubbiness.

And then I went to drama school where it became an obsession

and then of course, I became anorexic

because everyone that goes to drama school does.

I came through anorexia very well.

I mean, look how well I've recovered.

You wouldn't think, you know, anybody could recover this well,

but the one latent thing, I still don't eat cake

and I gave up cigarettes.

And I think the same thing. There's something sort of, you know,

ritualistic about, you know, lots of things, pouring a glass of wine.

I think that my own greed can frighten me a bit as well

and I think there's a little bit of me that thinks

if I started eating cake, what if I didn't stop?

Yes, well, yes. Been there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Alongside her general aversion to cakes,

like tea shop expert Annie Grey,

Jenny also harbours a particular grudge with one specific type.

What I hate about the cupcake is that they're aimed at women,

they're thrown at women like grenades, you know?

Cupcake! Cupcake!

And no self-respecting woman who knows anything about health

would eat that.

It's a bit yummy mummy, isn't it, as well?

It's just... They're like stupid shoes, they serve no purpose.

-Do you know what I mean?

-I know absolutely what you mean.

And this is the kind of thing that I can't stand.

It's just women are kind of submerged in this rubbish of,

you know, so, you get women who are sold this absolute rubbish

and in the end, so they're sitting there

in shoes in they can't walk in, eating this kind of thing

which is neither use nor... Well, it's ornamental.

But, I mean, it serves nothing, no purpose.

It's not an honest cake, you know,

like an Eccles cake or a proper... Do you know what I mean?

-Yeah. I know totally what you mean.

-Awful things.

But someone somewhere must love cupcakes.

In 2012 alone, as a nation, we bought over 110 million of them.

That's nearly two for every man, woman and child.

The annual cost? £23.5 million.

But, I suppose the thing about the cupcake

is you know where you are with it.

Yes, essentially there's not enough sponge at the bottom,

and too much icing on the top,

but for the majority of us, it's definitely a cake,

albeit one that's small in stature.

But there are some out there who want to challenge the idea that

a cake, large or small, should look like a mountain of pink frilliness.

And sweet silliness.

I'm at the London Dungeon to meet someone

who calls herself a cake curator.

Apparently she's keen to radically redefine cake expectations.

-Do you want to eat a cigarette butt?

-Er...

They're delicious. They're my favourite. Here you go.

HE GROANS

That's a real after party fag, isn't it?

You can see you've got lipstick marks at the end.

I love the fact you've actually even got the nicotine

coming through the filter.

Attention to detail.

Ooh, they're yummy.

So, the point that everything we do

is it repels you when you look at it,

but when you taste it, it tastes amazing.

Pretty cakes are boring, no-one wants pretty cakes.

The world has got a lot of pretty cakes.

You need cakes that provoke reaction.

Yep!

But there is a serious side.

She genuinely believes that these strange creations

are the perfect vehicle for generating topical debate.

The added bonus being, of course, you can eat everything afterwards.

You promise me that's a cake.

Well, yeah. I'm going to make you eat it in a minute.

So, one of the things that we do is we also use cake to educate people.

Yup.

So, we did a pop-up cake shop in a pathology museum...

OK.

..where our top sellers were STD cupcakes.

Then we had, um...

-Clap cakes?

-Yes. They're amazing.

-We had spines, we had cupcakes with ulcers on.

-OK.

We had cupcakes that showed how, when you get diabetic ulcers,

you have maggots that you use to clean it out.

Yum, that's good.

At biology at school, I kind of wandered off a little bit

and lost track,

I wouldn't with that.

That's exactly why things like STD cupcakes

are used to educate teenagers

because they can be like, "Yeah," and ignore a poster,

but if they're forced to eat a cupcake covered in genital warts

then they'd have to pay a bit more attention.

-Cupcake with genital warts.

-Yeah.

I'll have a cup of tea and cupcake with genital warts, thank you.

Throughout the country, she has a range of independent bakers

all looking to destabilise the image of cake as a light, lovely,

friendly thing to be had with a nice cup of tea.

Eurgh! No, no, no, no.

-Roadkill cake?

-Yeah.

It's gross, it's gross, it's gross.

Using a range of edible ingredients, and some clever techniques,

these bakers are solely interested in shocking us.

They're like the Sex Pistols of the cake world.

The important thing to us, it's anatomically correct and this is...

Oh, this is correct.

..what a badger would look like.

It's like every badger I've ever seen.

I can't do this.

I so can't do this.

I've never know such a fuss about cutting a cake.

OK, I'm faffing. I'm cutting the head off a badger!

That, I have to tell you, I can't do.

I truly can't do that.

That is how good your cake is.

If you don't eat that you've got to promise to eat

a slice of the next cake.

There's one last unexpected surprise up Miss Cakehead's sleeve.

She's had a special cake made and it seems her ability to shock

isn't just about blood and gore... yet.

Isn't that fantastic?

Are you sure I've got that many crow's feet?

I like it.

A little weird, but I do like it.

To me, it's just a work of art.

You can eat yourself, lick yourself, do what you want.

Serve it up to people.

Yeah. I mean, you'd want to share it.

It's just who gets what bit?

So, is this a little bit odd, slicing into your own head?

It's not something I do every day.

Whoa.

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa!

Look at that, though.

That is awesome!

That's completely awesome.

I'll never be able to slice into a cake again in quite the same way.

A gourmet's delight and light as a feather.

TABLE GROANS AND BUCKLES

And so it would seem that the dividing lines

between one person's bun and another's sweet bread

or someone's turnover and the next person's cake

is exceedingly fine and entirely subjective.

No sooner do you begin to establish some firmish foundations

before another interloper upsets the apple cart.

In my exploration of all things cake, the sizes and shapes,

the stories, histories and traditions and the flavours,

it strikes me that no-one can quite decide on what makes a cake a cake.

But, for me, what defines it is an invisible ingredient.

It's the spirit in which a cake is made.

The reason we do it.

The moment that cake slice slides in and we share it.