Peter Ross: Meeting the Edinburgh Cake Ladies

Published on Tuesday 18 October 2011 15:41

Diets and guilt are left at the door when the Edinburgh Cake Ladies meet to share their heavenly creations and tips for success

‘CAKE?” says Gwen. “It’s amazing.” As an article of faith this is simple enough, but is held very dear by the Edinburgh Cake Ladies, a group of women – and, as we shall see, one man – who gather quarterly to gorge themselves on home baking.

On Thursday evening, in Loudons, a cafe and bakery in Fountainbridge, they arrive singly or sometimes in pairs, cake-tins clutched in white-knuckled anticipation, each new arrival deepening the smell of chocolate and sugar. By 7pm, there are 22 cakes laid out on the table, none of them small, it being a rule of the club that only large sliceable cakes are allowed. As one sticky-fingered zealout puts it: “Cupcakes are has-beens.”

It is quite a sight. Chocolate raspberry cheesecake, chocolate and cinnamon cake, chilli chocolate cake, a chocolatey Gateau St Honoré crowned by a circle of choux puffs filled with raspberry cream. And so on. The idea is that there will be no two cakes of the same type, this being a faux-pas akin to wearing the same dress as someone else to a party. A chocolate and Guinness cake is described to me as “death on a plate. It’s got the three bad things in it – butter, sugar and alcohol – so hopefully it’ll taste good.”

Each cake is topped with a little flag bearing the name of the cake and the slogan “Feel the fear and bake it anyway”. At the last minute, a young woman called Leila arrives on a Vespa, bearing a rosewater sponge with pistachios and cream. The table groans under the weight. The Edinburgh Cake Ladies groan with deferred pleasure. Before the cakes can be eaten there is what can only be described as a photo-call. Everyone takes out their phones and iPads and starts snapping away, capturing every millimetre of sparkly frosting with digital zoom. The cakes will soon be gone. Photography commits them to posterity in their state of grace. Everyone’s phone is full of pictures of pastry, megabytes of megabites.

The Edinburgh Cake Ladies is a fairly new group, having formed last year. “Pulverising diets since 2010,” says one member with pride. But it is an idea which has caught on fast, in part because it is so straightforward – bake a cake, bring it along, eat lots – and in part because of social networking. There is a shared Facebook group and most of the women here are on Twitter. They use the site to keep in touch with each other and the wider foodie community, posting photographs of their cakes and sharing tips about baking.

“I had problems with my cake,” says Michelle Holden, who is 30 and works in the financial sector. “But I went on Twitter and asked @TheBoyWhoBakes, who won The Great British Bake Off, and he saved my buttercream.”

Hilary Sturzaker, 42, who blogs at mymonkfish.com and has organised tonight’s event, climbs on a chair to announce the start. “All right,” she calls, “dig in!”

No one stands on ceremony. No one says “after you”. There is, I am told, no etiquette. It is a feeding frenzy, albeit a rather jolly one, as if a plague of locusts had attended Marcia Blaine School. The Edinburgh Cake Ladies are mostly professional women in their thirties, though some are a fair bit older; the youngest member, Helen McNaughton, is just 13. There is a vague idea that these events – known as “eatings” – are good for business networking, in the same way as the golf course might be for men, but no one lets work get in the way of the serious business of stuffing yourself silly.

Knives slice, plates are filled, and the first glorious forkfuls are shovelled into gobs. It is a moment to savour. Everyone has skipped tea, some have skipped lunch, keen to leave room for cake. There is no judgement here if you are seen to eat a lot. Indeed, those who do are honoured for their endurance and capacity. The record is held by Alison Dean, the club’s founder, who once devoured 12 slices at a sitting, having been goaded into it by a boastful tweeter in Leeds who said he had eaten 11. “Yes,” says Alison, whom I hear referred to as Mrs Hollow Legs. “Twelve slices in two hours. Witnessed and photographed. And I went home later and had a piece of lemon and coconut cake.”

Many of the Edinburgh Cake Ladies are evangelical about baking – “When I hold dough, it just feels so right, like this is what I was born to do,” says one – but what these get-togethers are about is a celebration of appetite. “Yeah,” nods Lea Harris, 53, who appeared in the first series of The Great British Bake Off and is responsible, tonight, for that astonishing Gateau St Honoré, “we’re gluttons, all of us.”

Women, often, it seems to me, are taught to regard food, especially fattening food, as the enemy. But not here. “I don’t think we should punish ourselves for eating,” says Lisa Brunton-Stocks, a 39-year-old pastry chef who has driven down from her home in Portlethem near Aberdeen. “The more calories the better.”

Lea Harris nods. “Guilt,” she says, “is left behind in the car boot.” Lea, as a child, was taught to cook by her father, a butcher. She started with jam tarts and has kept going in a steep upward trajectory. She once turned up at an Edinburgh Cake Ladies event with a creation called The Tower Of Sin, six inches tall and consisting of eight layers of meringue, chocolate and cream. And did it taste sinful? “Oh God,” she purrs, “yeah.”

As the evening wears on, the laughter grows louder, the voices shrill. The sugar rush is kicking in. Fingers are licked, bellies stretched. There was, perhaps, a slight nervousness at first. This is not a competition. There are no prizes for the best cake, no brickbats for the worst. But, of course, there is a degree of oneupmanship. One woman confesses to having had hot flushes, worrying how her cake would turn out. And a few keep a close eye on the table, noticing whose cake gets finished first and whose seems less popular. An unsliced cake on a table full of its half-demolished sisters has a certain wallflower quality. In the end, however, no cake gets left behind.

It’s fascinating, this renaissance in home baking which has seen sales of cake tins skyrocket, and The Great British Bake Off become the most watched programme on BBC2. It is, surely, something to do with the state of the economy and wider society; the creeping dread that many of us feel when perusing the morning headlines can be offset, for a while, by the nostalgic comforts of buttery sponge and piped icing.

“It’s all to do with getting back to the Seventies when things were easier,” Hilary Sturzaker agrees. People my age, from 35 onwards, we all remember watching our mothers baking. You want to go back to how things were when you were a kid.”

Stuart Allan, 50, is the only man among the Edinburgh Cake Ladies. Despite the name, by the way, they do welcome men; and also Glaswegians, whom they regard with compassion and pity as refugees from a city with little talent for cake. They would gladly send Weegie cake lovers back along the M8 with an aid package of Battenberg.

Anyway, back to Stuart. He has brought along a chocolate fruit cake, an incredibly tempting affair covered in glistening cherries, which is going down a treat. “As a man, I don’t really feel out of place,” he says. “All they are interested in is cake. If I was a bit of cake walking around, I’d probably get more interest.”

In fact, the Edinburgh Cake Ladies seem more than happy to help the male of the species with their baking. Phil, Scotland On Sunday’s photographer, happens to mention that his courgette cake tends to be too heavy and is immediately surrounded by six women telling him that he must, first, squeeze all the water out of his courgette if he is to have any chance of success.

Leila Arfa, 33, the woman who turned up on the Vespa, is an event-planner and food-blogger. She is agog at the cakes on display. “Food porn is very close to my heart.” There is a relationship, she says, between food and sensuality and art; a road that links Titian with photographs of tiramisu. “But it’s a roundabout route. It would take a couple of weeks and some gin.”

By 8.15pm, it is all getting too much for some. “I’ve only had four slices and I’ve got the shakes,” says Michelle Holden. Another Cake Lady agrees: “I think I might bow out. I shouldn’t have had that Toffee Crisp at 3pm.”

The final rite which must be observed at an “eating” is the ritual bringing out of the leftover boxes. “Oh,” says Sophia Jackson, “the boxes are coming out. If you aren’t quick you’ll be weeping in a corner.”

Everyone has come prepared with giant plastic boxes, each around the size of a washing basin, and these are swiftly filled with pieces of cake, to be later sampled by families and colleagues and perhaps even alone in front of Celebrity MasterChef.

It is astonishing how quickly the cake goes. There was so much of it and now there is none. Where there was dessert there is now a desert. “Look at these crumbs on the floor,” sighs Alison Dean, hollow-legged and heavy-hearted. “What a waste.”

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tonidave920

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 08:24 AM

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Blackwater

Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 02:56 AM

My wife and I loved this. We lived in Edinburgh -- Ogilvie Terrace by Harrison Park -- while commuting to the University of St Andrews for post-grad study in Scottish History. Please send us any unfinished slices. JD & Michelle Seattle

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AlisonEdinburgh

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 05:06 PM

Thanks for the article, it was a great evening. We just wanted to add that anyone can join in, we welcome everyone. You can find us at http:edinburghcakeladies.wordpress.com and on twitter @Edincakeladies and on facebook at http:www.facebook.comEdinburghcakeladies Thank you!

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