Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time—The Great British Bake Off, launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has become Britain’s equivalent of the Super Bowl: a mixing bowl in which competitors vie to whip up chocolate, orange, and cardamom ganache, or mounds of gold-painted physalis and crystallized rosebuds higher than the hairstyle of Madame de Pompadour. Friends bet on the outcome and gather for the final to hurl scones at the screen if their favorite falls at the final curdle.
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.
