When original is just weird.

Jeremy Kyle is the perfect show to do the ironing too.  When he starts to shout, "It's called the Jeremy Kyle show!" you can pretend you are ironing his face.  The only downside is that if you have a huge pile to get through the program slips into This Morning.  When Phillip Schofield had his hand up the backside of a small stuffed puppet he was quite cute but now watching the silver fox discuss pornography and cakes at half past ten in the morning is disturbing.

Phillip Schofield and Gordon the Gopher

This week Clare from Steps launched a cake competition.  She was looking quite large but said she didn't understand why she was getting so much stick in the press for doing a cake competition because obviously she wouldn't eat them all.  She followed this up by saying, "let's face it, everyone loves cake!"  

Cake is one of my favourite things and I started to seriously enter the competition, even though I don't want a new kitchen (which is the prize).  If the prize was someone to clean said kitchen and wash up after me I would be baking now.

They said that you had to send in your favourite cake recipe but it had to be your recipe.  Is it possible to have a truly original cake recipe?  Cake is simple, butter, eggs, sugar, flour and some flavouring.  Any flavours that are any good must have already been tried.  Claire baked an apple cake that I'm sure I've seen the recipe for in the Good Food Magazine.  It had a sort of crumble topping that supposedly made it crunchy.  My favourite cake is probably Nigella Lawson's Coca Cola Cake but that is in a book.

 

Or maybe it's a lemon drizzle cake, or a carrot cake, or a light fruit cake or a Dutch apple cake.  

Summer always brings a variety of courgette cakes and I make an interesting carrot cake with beetroot in, but none of these are original ideas.  

What could I try to win the competition?  Banana and Marmite? Peanut Butter and Mint? Jaffa cake and Iron Bru?  Baileys and Lavender?  Ketchup Cupcakes?  Parsnip Brownies? Suddenly I'm reminding myself of a sitcom character.

Letitia Cropley - Queen of Cordon Bleugh!