Let Them Eat Cake

Cake shops are expanding like the national waistline; you can tour London on a vintage red 1960s Routemaster “Afternoon Tea” bus while eating Victoria sponge. Icing has never been so hot: The Surrey School of Sugarcraft, which began offering classes in 2002, has moved from someone’s dining room to shiny new premises where it teaches students how to fashion everything from fondant fuchsias to candy cobwebs. And the Clandestine Cake Club, founded by a Yorkshirewoman in 2010 with the idea of encouraging groups where each member bakes a cake then joins the others at a “secret location” to eat them, boasts over 8,000 members, with chapters in Riyadh and Okinawa.

What is going on? Cake used to be a home affair, something beloved but no more inherently exciting than the family sofa: springy, comforting, solid. Now, it seems, it is a platform on which all manner of national and personal dramas can play out. Ever willing to undertake risky missions to apprise Weekly Standard readers of current trends, I hardened my arteries and set out to fork through the layers of ancient and recent history that lie beneath the British obsession with cake.

My first stop was a meeting of the Clandestine Cake Club in Cambridge, a picturesque university town usually associated with punting on the river and cycling with a stripy scarf dangling across the handlebars. I knew nothing about my fellow bakers. Our precise meeting place was emailed to us a couple of days before the event. As the day approached, I felt oddly like someone going to a Tupperware party that was also a blind date.

The undercover location turned out to be a function room in a pub in the town center. As secret trysts go, this was right up there with the thrill of meeting in Starbucks. But the company was intriguing: There were 11 of us, and we were all women, varying widely in age. Amongst us were a hospital doctor specializing in palliative care, a lecturer in 16th-century literature, a business owner who makes cakes for a living, and a couple of seniors.

My own cake had suffered in transit and resembled a mudslide following Hurricane Mocha. But more practiced club members had produced towering achievements: a Guinness cake with an Irish four-leaf clover dusted in cocoa on the top; a blueberry and amaretto cake; a piña colada cake stacked like a highball with pineapple and cocktail umbrellas; a strawberry and Pimms cake, and—inventively—a Lapsang Loaf, a tea bread where the dried fruit had previously been soaked in Lapsang Souchong, imparting a strange but compelling smoky incense flavor, like bacon eaten in a Chinese temple.

I chatted with Ros, the doctor, and Ruth, the lecturer. They were both very slim and attractive: You would not suspect either of having a serious cake habit. But they confessed that in addition to the CCC, they ran a private baking circle where friends gathered to make and consume themed cakes. They were also passionate viewers of The Great British Bake Off.

I asked if men ever came to the CCC. “Yes, occasionally,” they said. Anyone is welcome, but women predominate. I wondered aloud why cake was so central right now to British social life. Surely it hadn’t always been like this? “It’s about kindness,” they ruminated, “and celebrating British eccentricity. That’s the difference between the Bake Off and programs like The X Factor: People on the Bake Off are nice.”

They emphasized that although it is a competition, the Bake Off isn’t cruel. Quirky entrants are encouraged: One woman built a gingerbread Tudor pub complete with lime-gelatin pool table; an aerospace engineer designed a piece of clockwork with pies shaped as cogs. If you are kooky, then say it with cake.

The Bake Off is more than a little kitchen kitsch. Saucy puns abound: The worst dismissal for the pastry round—”you’ve got a soggy bottom”—has become a national catchphrase. However, Ros and Ruth insisted, authenticity blooms in this hothouse of artifice: “British people often aren’t very good at cooking, but nobody buys packet mixes here. People really make cake. It comes from the heart.”

Certainly cake broke the ice(ing) with this group of women, who would otherwise not have met. By the end of the evening, we were falling about with laughter at a story of somebody’s mother-in-law who had accidentally gave her 3-year-old son a reindeer costume intended to be worn by a dog. I reflected that the CCC may be a new way to do a very old thing: host a kaffeeklatsch where anyone is welcome.

Women and cake have always been closely associated. Nicki Humble in Cake: A Global History notes that the roundness of cake is linked to annual cycles. For over a thousand years, the Chinese have eaten moon cakes as part of an autumn festival. The pagan Russians baked flat “sun cakes” to honor the returning sun in springtime. In every culture, women—with their own cycles of fertility—tend to be ritually linked to the making and distributing of cake.

Modern cakebaking began in the 16th century, when smaller private homes began to have walls sturdy enough to incorporate an oven without posing a fire risk, and when the raising power of beaten egg began to be widely understood. Making a “great cake” was still, however, an exhausting and expensive project: Eggs would be separated and hand-beaten for half an hour or more; sugar chipped from a large cone and crushed into granules; spices ground; icing spread with a bundle of feathers. The lady of the manor would be justly proud of this skill set. While French aristocrats preferred to employ pastry cooks—who, after the revolution, became restaurateurs—Britain retained the habit of admiring cake-making as a domestic art appropriate to a high-born lady. The French still buy their cakes. The British still make them at home.

However, there is also a long British tradition of cake being created chiefly for display. The tierful race to the top for British brides was begun by Queen Victoria’s daughter, the Princess Royal, in 1858. Her wedding cake was nearly seven feet high. Only the bottom layer was actually cake. The rest was sugar-work: “domes and crowns, plinths and niches, statues and plaques.” Ordinary people had no access to the kind of sugar-sculptor capable of chiseling this rococo cascade. So they resorted to the now-familiar stack of cakes. Professor Humble notes that many of the most famous cakes in British literature remain uneaten. They often represent social climbing, or what cannot be had.

To assess the latest pipedreams in sugarcraft, I visited Cake International, an event held at Alexandra Palace in London: a vast, shabby, glass-domed Victorian exhibition space in which the faded palm trees look small. Although there are specialist stalls selling everything from gold sugar gravel to cookie cutters shaped as trombones and stilettos, Cake International is chiefly a showcase for hundreds of cake decorators who compete to produce works that are more jaw-dropping than mouth-watering. Many of the creations looked more likely to take a bite out of me than I was to take a bite out of them. There were cacti cupcakes that really did look as if they had come from a desert rather than a dessert. There was a severed-head cake dripping sugar gore, and a horribly realistic set of intestines, vertebrae, and pulled teeth. There was a raccoon, a unicorn, a fishmonger’s slab with salmon and a lobster on it, a life-sized ballet dancer (Anna Pavlova?)—all cake.

Most visitors were just wandering around gawping. “Can you believe that?” a woman next to me breathed when she saw a cake depicting a bronze statue of a drunk on a bench surrounded by pigeons. Weirdly, there was no cake available to eat, just pizza or salad. I felt hungry and frustrated. Then I reflected that in order to win next year, I had only to invent a method of making sugar rhinestones and construct a life-sized Liberace cake with a grand piano covered in mirror tiles reflecting a Venetian sunset. Easy.

Christine Flinn, a Master Royal Icer with an exhibition at the event, explained to me that icing had peaks and troughs, and we were entering a trough. This was for the best because icing was, ultimately, not for the shallow. It was an architectural art. Flinn’s own creations bear out this assertion: She can construct a sugar gazebo or a hammock out of strands of icing no thicker than the filament of a toothbrush. (“I can float things,” she confided.)

On the Christmas cake of my childhood, thick white royal icing set so hard that it resembled enamel: Dentures were routinely lost in it. Flinn assured me that this is not what royal icing is supposed to be like: “Firm but yielding,” she said emphatically, “with a pleasant bite.” I looked into her face and felt the admiration of a child for a strict but caring nanny.

Seeing so much incredible but inedible cake left me determined to start baking when I got home. I tried an 18th-century recipe for pepper cake made by William Wordsworth’s family and reprinted in the National Trust’s Cakes, Bakes and Biscuits (2016). It contained ground black pepper, cloves, ginger, candied peel, and treacle alongside the usual raisins, currants, flour, butter, and eggs. The result was dense: something to keep you going through a long ride on the roof of a bumpy stagecoach over Westmorland hills in the rain.

But the smell in the kitchen while it was baking was sublime. It brought back memories of my mother, who died last year, and also my grandmother’s kitchen: warm and fragrant. One doesn’t have to be Proust to have cake-memories that run deep. Most of us can recall a birthday cake from childhood. Cake is to bread what champagne is to wine: Its buoyancy celebrates rising years and raised spirits. It counters the pinch of austerity with the promise of abundance.

John Tenniel illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (1872) with a thinly disguised political cartoon featuring cake. In it a decrepit Lion (William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister) and a pompous Unicorn (Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader) are fighting over a plum cake, which represents Great Britain. It is a striking, if absurd, image of a nation whose union is always threatened with the possibility of crumbling. Back then, it was Ireland that was intent on leaving; more recently it has been Scotland. Disagreement about the future of the United Kingdom has rarely been so visible as during the first decades of this millennium.

If cake is an emblem of the United Kingdom, it makes sense that it is now so hotly contested. The symbolic stakes are high. The final of 2016’s Great British Bake Off ordered lavish royal picnics to be baked in a tent strung with Union Jacks, where strawberries, blueberries, and whipped cream echoed the national colors. Outside, pastoral scenes of waving wildflowers and safely grazing sheep promoted an idyll to match the inner world of 1950s-style sausage rolls, meringue crowns, and smoothly cohesive layer-cakes.

Will the sponge always rise for the British Empire? Probably, yes. At a time of uncertainty and division, cake for tea is the one thing on which we all agree.

Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.