Cakes of Joy

It's my birthday tomorrow and naturally I'm thinking of cake. Cake and I go back a long way.

The first cake I remember was a photograph of a cake. No one I know ever made this cake but it was my favourite cake in all the world when I was small. It was in The Good Housekeeping Cookbook circa 1954, in full colour, the piece de resistance of all the cakes.

Imagine a cake, a large round special cake, covered with hard white icing, and trimmed with pink rosettes, pink stars and silver balls. And to make it even more desirable, it was tied round with a wide pink satin ribbon and finished with a perfect bow. A cake of joy for a little girl to dream of.

I knew exactly what the cake under the icing would be like. It would be sweet and light and it would be a sponge. It would be light yellow and there would be two layers joined together with jam and cream.

But one day I read the recipe and discovered that the cake was a dark fruit cake. I couldn't believe it. Yuck! I must have suppressed this new dark knowledge, because until today I'd actually forgotten that. So much for the cake of joy. Now it's upset me twice.