A British professor of diet and population health Susan Jebb has prompted controversy by drawing parallels between cakes in the office and passive smoking.
"We all like to think we’re rational intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment," she said.
It was show and tell time after the real judges had made their choices in the shed classes. Now it was our turn.
After a Covid-19 enforced break, I and my three sisters; the Queen of Cookery (QC), the Earthquake Baby (EB) and the Auckland Alchemist (AA), along with friends the Blenheim Baker (BB), the Christchurch Cook (CC) and the Novice Niece (NN), had gathered in our home town to compete in the baking challenge.
This is the show class where we all must use the same recipe, set by show organisers.
Since some of us travel from outside the district, to make our mini competition fair, we each must attempt the recipe once and freeze that beauty or beast until show day. This year the challenge recipe was for an apple cinnamon cake.
Early on I caused a minor flurry when, after reading the recipe in the show schedule, I wondered why it contained no raising agent. Was this a mistake, or part of the challenge? The EB was dispatched to find out. Yes, it was an error. Two teaspoons of baking powder were added to the recipe ingredients list and the necessary alterations were made to the show schedule.
Before her cake made it to the mixing bowl, AA was accused of cheating by practising.
Mere weeks before the event she had served the EB, QC and the NN something suspiciously like the show cake to boost their spirits after the cancelled Elton John concert. She airily dismissed it as an Annabel Langbein favourite.
At the postmortem, we all noticed her cake had a significantly different exterior appearance.
Brutal interrogation revealed she had used raw apple, rather than the specified stewed, and extra cinnamon (a la Annabel) along with baking soda to make it a better colour. Both the real judges and us wannabes had not been fooled.
The NN also revealed she had added her own little touch to the recipe, stewing the apple in cider vinegar. Online claims decreed it was delicious for breakfast. In the cake, however, it left an aftertaste sadly lacking the delicious factor.
My offering, which I had to fan grill in order to get some colour on to it, was suspiciously flat on top and solid, like one of Lenny Henry’s small windowless buildings. When it was cut to reveal a solid stodge, it was clear I had left out the baking powder, something the other bakers were a little too gleeful about, given I was the one to notice its absence in the original recipe.
The Christchurch Cook, notorious for coming second in a previous challenge even though she left out the required sugar, was the official winner at the show, despite the fact much of the bottom of her cake came adrift when she removed it from the tin. When she informed her husband of her triumph, he suggested it would be good to see evidence of her baking skills during the rest of the year. In appropriate rural style, she told him to calm the farm. The only other one in our group to be placed in the real competition was the Queen of Cookery, who scored third.
Both of those cakes were well flavoured, as was the BB’s, and the cooked bits of the EB’s were OK too. In the end, consensus was not reached, perhaps due to the side-tracking by some participants sampling my prize-winning damson gin.
Thinking about the silliness later, it was hard not to feel guilty we were indulging in such frivolity when those ravaged by Cyclone Gabrielle were still immersed in misery and silt.
But if there was any relevant lesson here, it was for those conspiracy theorists bizarrely claiming the cyclone to be a government construct designed to subjugate and control us.
When you see that seven people willingly completing the same reasonably straightforward task for a humble A&P Show cannot do so in a coherent and consistent way and agree on the outcome, you know the widespread collusion required for any such conspiracy is impossible.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer
