cake du jour - chocolate

My mother made a chocolate cake probably every other week. Chocolate cake made from a victoria sponge recipe with cocoa not drinking chocolate in the mix. The buttercream filling included Nescafe (dissolved in water at the bototm of a tupperware cup and poured into the butter and icing sugar - a plum job to make as the bowl required scraping after), and on high days and holidays there might be something involving melted cooking chocolate on the top. It wasn't very rich, it wasn't even very chocolatey, but there is no chocolate cake in the world better than one made by my mother. I remember shortly after I'd left home carrying half a cake back up to London, and putting it under my bed when I finally arrived at my damp bedsit. In the middle of that night I had to get out of bed to eat a slice, sitting on the floor in the dark, wishing I were still at home. From the age of about 10 I gave up requesting a traditional birthday cake of any description and settled for the chocolate. Even now if I remember I still send a request for chocolate cake ahead of me whenever I go home.

As kids we'd get a regulation thin slice, followed inevitably by another thinner one (spot the puritanical streak), and then it'd go back in the tin. Stacked in the cupboard under its matching blue biscuit tin. Later on I'd sneak into the kitchen and open the cupboard to ease myself inside and gently pull out the tin, levering off the lid then running my finger down the cut side to scoop out the buttercream filling, or even cut the thinnest slice possible off to eat some more. My silence would give me away. 'What are you doing in there?' she'd shout, and I'd stand there behind the cupboard door swallowing guiltily so I that could tell her 'Nothing'. She wasn't fooled. She never was, though I never got into trouble, exactly. I was just out of favour for a while. One of the advantages of age and my prolonged absence is that cake filching is now acceptable behaviour, and I no longer have to hide behind the cupboard door. 'What are you doing in there?' she still asks 'Evening it up a bit?' I reply. You can get away with a whole lot more after the first 30 years, I find.

cake du jour

We never actually had Dundee cake as kids. I used to want it, but as the only cakes we ever ate were made by my mum (two a week), and Dundee wasn't in her repertoire, so we never got it. Dundee cake came in a red tin, beause it was bought. We didn't have any money when I was growing up, so we didn't have things that were bought. Especially not foodstuffs. Foodstuffs were cooked, in the kitchen. Now that I am older I realise that this want was entirely about the not having. I have always been prone to wanting things merely because I cannot have them.

At the time though, it was the almonds that made me want it; those whole almonds stuck into the top of the cake in concentric circles. I suppose they seemed exotic. Certainly my mum never stuck things in the top of the cake. Granted, she regularly poured all manner of delicious things over her cakes (things which I would usually get to lick from the bowl), but they weren't almonds, and they weren't stuck in.

I remember the disappointment the first time I tasted Dundee cake. I ought to have known because I don't really like fruit cake, except my mum's. I especially don't like rich and slightly bitter fruit cake, which has no icing or marzipan to distract you from all that fruit. And almonds? They don't make up for the lack of sickly sweetness. In fact, they are sort of hard and tasteless having been through the baking process.

I don't remember the last time I saw a Dundee cake. Were they a product of the 1970s? Or have the citizens of Dundee been making cakes, sticking almonds in the top of them, and stashing them away in red tins for centuries? Suddenly I need to know.