Dec 8, 2002
On Cake
I once attended an interview in which my fellow interviewer asked the hapless candidate a surprising question. After quizzing her about personal work qualities, experience of working within tight deadlines and what she thought she could bring to such a challenging role, he asked her whether a Jaffa Cake was, in fact, a cake or a biscuit.
She launched into a response (“It’s a biscuit, obviously”), and then pondered out loud at the name (“…of course it’s called a cake…”) which caused her to stumble and lapse into silence, unable to answer conclusively.
The correct answer, of course (and you might want to bear this in mind if you have any forthcoming interviews) is that it’s either or both – it all depends on where it’s shelved. If the shop owner puts it among biccies, then a biccie it is. If it nestles in next to the cakes, then let it be a cake.
The cold fact is, there is no right answer: it doesn’t matter. In the context of an interview, all the panel want is to see you choose a position to argue and stick to it. It’s all about conviction.
Actually, there is a correct (legal) answer, used only by smartarses in interview situations, which states that it’s been a cake since the British government decided that chocolate-covered biscuits attracted a higher tax rate (17.5%) than cakes (0%) and tried to have the humble Jaffa reclassified as a biccie much to Mr McVitie’s dismay. They still insist it’s a cake.
Living in Liverpool in my final year, the man who shared the flat downstairs from us in a strange old converted victorian school building was called Al, and was not a cakey kind of person. I know this because he said at least once a week – more frequently on festive occasions – that he was not a cakey kind of person. Gradually it sank in.
We had the kind of loose open flat arrangement which allowed the respective residents of his flat and mine to wander between the two freely. Over a year of frantic revision and experiments in social culture, we swapped university social lives (they dated friends from our course, we went to see an Abba tribute band at their student union), cleaning products, study tips and celebrations. On birthdays, one of us would bake a cake (usually carrot or chocolate), and when the slabs of sweetness went around the gathering on paper napkins, a bass voice would pipe from the corner “No thanks, I’m not really a cakey kind of person”. Al would pass on the cake, thank you very much, and grab another beer.
It didn’t matter how nice the cake was, or how lovingly prepared; Al was just not a cakey kind of person, and that was that. Over the year, we tried to find the limits of his objection, to define exactly what a cakey kind of person was and wasn’t. The defining characteristics seemed to be a loathing for the consistency of the foodstuff, rather than the particular taste or texture.
Whenever offered a biscuit for dunking in tea, Al would enquire whether it was a soft biscuit or a hard one. Rich tea, digestive, nice, even your standard custard cream were all fine and perfectly acceptable for general dunkage and munchage, but he’d have none of that lucury cookie nonsense. The world of the cookie, he explained, was fraught with the suggestion of softness, and frankly there wasn’t a world of difference between a luxury triple choc dipped thick cookie (89p from Tesco’s on Allerton Road) and a cake, when you got down to it, despite having different ingredients, behaviours and properties.
Sometimes, he scared us with his crazy cake talk.
On the pro side, I’d say that my mum is definitely a cakey kind of person, and that for that reason I probably am too. It’s got little to do with the taste or texture for me, and everything to do with the decoration. My mum has always specialised in making cakes to remember. They may not have been enormously professional, and they could arguably have been fairly average tasting, but I can remember nearly every birthday cake from childhood. Elaborate use of food-colouring, marzipan, other decorative edibles and props meant that every cake was both memorable and intensely personal. I may never have had a party in a burger restaurant, but in my time I’ve had birthday cakes shaped like maps, guitars, shoes, a bathtub and a dragon, complete with painted cornflake scales.
I am a cakey kind of person. Childhood holidays visiting relatives in southern Germany were like a cake-filled dream. I could say Schwarzwaldekirschtorte before I could ask where the bathroom was. I can make a simple sponge without consulting a recipe – though I haven’t for ages – and I will happily argue long and hard that the best possible topping for stewed apple is, in fact, not crumble, but sponge and then evaporated milk, as in eve’s pudding.
Question: if someone said today “let them eat Brioche” would we still think they were being quite so elitist and condescending, I wonder?
I am a cakey kind of person – squishy and sweet and sort of sickly after too much – and I could murder a brownie right about now…
