Let Me Eat Cake

Here are some cakes that I found in a shop window in Paris last year:

Oh all right, they may be more French patisserie than cakes, perhaps, but still - - YUM.

Here are some more Parisian patisserie:

More pies and flans than cakes, I suppose. I know I'd absolutely love these. They look like just my kind of thing.

For about a week now I've been craving CAKE. I saw a television programme, The Secret Millionaire, which showed the kitchen of a Good Woman who baked cakes for charity.

It reminded my of Cousin Nancy's kitchen in Barrow. Nancy, who had worked as a cook, was always baking. Her kitchen was a mass of dough and cake mix and cake tins and pastry and butter icing and Royal icing and cakes cooling on racks, and the smell was wonderful.

Now her daughter Dorothy, who made Olli and Gareth's wedding cake last year, makes and sells very elaborate, beautifully decorated cakes. For the opening of Barrow-in-Furness's new lifeboat station she made a perfect scale model of it, in cake.

But it's not posh cake that I crave - it's ordinary cake. Madeira cake. The kind that the French call Quatre quarts. Butterfly buns with buttercream. Victoria sponge. My grandma's fruit buns with a bit of spice in. Home-made chocolate cake of the kind that even I used to make. Bring out the cake.

Of course, though, I've been diabetic for a few years now. Can't eat cake. Damn it.

Most of the time I've adjusted to it and most of the time I don't care. But today I want some CAKE.

Okay, that's it, moan over. Back to the raw carrots. Sighhhhhh.