Hollywood and friends

It's feeling like autumn. The nights are drawing in, the conkers and leaves are tumbling, yet the weather still has to warm up for summer...

Televisually, September means we are back with old friends. Hapless Pete and pals on Cold Feet. The increasingly psychopathic but much wronged Doctor Foster. Fondly bickering Phil and Kirstie on Location Location Location, though sadly this series won't be featuring the episode filmed in our part of York sometime in May. Disparaging Jeremy and his Oxbridge nobs on University Challenge. Clever Victoria on Only Connect, which also featured Oxbridge nob and University Challenge winner (til her team was disqualified) Gail Trimble.

And The Great British Bake-Off. I was going to stay loyal to the BBC, I really was, like Mary, Mel and Sue before me. But the BBC has become a hideous Tory propaganda machine and is so biased (pro-Brexit, anti-Labour) in its news reporting that frankly it doesn't deserve my loyalty. Plus I actually like Channel 4. Because Last Leg. Because Jon Snow. Because Frasier. Because of my beautiful subtitles gracing its Countdown screens all those years ago.

And the news is so stressful right now that it's unbearable. I just want to look at cake instead. And biscuits and bread and sticky toffee caramel. And, new presenters aside, the show is so reassuringly familiar and cosy. The rest of it has been transferred in its entirety. The music. The bad puns laced with innuendo. The marquee with torrential rain streaming down its window panes. The tea cups and bunting. The malfunctioning ovens. The cakes hovering over bins. The mysterious proving drawers. The crazy contestants, although they seem a little Liverpool heavy this year, maybe as an homage to Paul, the only surviving face from the original series. He's just the same too, with his fierce eyes, dismissive comments and occasional bear-like handshake reaching across the work surfaces.

Admittedly, the ad breaks and heavy sponsorship are as irritating as I feared, but at least the content of the programme hasn't been cut short to accommodate them. And I'm having to get used to it being on a Tuesday, with Jo Brand's Extra Slice on a Thursday, rather than the Wednesday and Friday slots they held on the BBC. Routine is important to me. But Sandi Toksvig is very cuddly, and I quite like Noel Fielding's dreamlike musing, even if he doesn't seem to be that interested in the food. Prue Leith is scary though. She's much more of a force to be reckoned with than Mary Berry. She's about twice the height of Mary for starters. And you won't be crying on her shoulder (you wouldn't reach that far!) or getting any sympathy or gentle advice if you mess up.

I am part of a small team working on a baking book at the moment. It's to raise money for the school (so it can still afford to buy things like books, and, er, staff) and putting it together has been a lot of fun. It's going to feature lots of delicious everyday recipes, submitted by parents, teachers and local cafes. Mostly things that you should be able to bake with kids, as opposed to the impossible challenges you see on Bake Off. So more this:

Than this:

The book will come complete with professional colour photos, hopefully no typos (since it's my job to find them) and a decent level of wit. Please buy a copy when it's published, hopefully sometime when we are officially - rather than only weatherwise - in autumn.

Great Continental Railway Journeys: Freiburg to Hannover

German Romantic poetry 

Michael Portillo arrives in Freiburg liked the well-heeled public school boy that he is, adorned in a racing green blazer with white pinstripes. He is here to discover the meaning of Germanness. In 1913, the year of his Bradshaw's, Germany was still only recently unified. It was still trying to carve out a national identity, and hadn't yet started the First World War. Shame on me, four sentences in and I've already mentioned "the war" in the same breath as Germany, like Basil Fawlty and The Sun newspaper before me. Back then it seems that we Brits liked Germany as a holiday destination a lot more than we do now. Schiller and Goethe had filled our heads with Romantic nature poetry, and we had fallen for the Brothers Grimm, whose disturbing tales from the forest had been made a lot more wholesome in translation. In fact, we liked travelling to Germany so much that around 6,000 of us were trapped behind enemy lines when World War I broke out.

Most of us were after a cuckoo clock. Some of us still go all the way to Germany to buy one, as evidenced by the customers in a shop in Triberg in the Black Forest. In the shop, Portillo has a go at carving a leaf under the watchful eye of the master carver. Afterwards the carver allows Portillo to keep the leaf as a "souvenir", too polite to say that it's because the result is too shit for him to use. Apparently, the traditional triangular shape of the Black Forest cuckoo clock was inspired by the roofs of new houses built along the Black Forest railway. And originally the cuckoo clock was intended to be a "cockerel clock", but this involved the internal bellows having to play too many notes.

Soon Michael is tucking into a Black Forest Gateau, at pains to point out that we leave out the most important ingredient - the boozy Kirsch - in the English translation. However, the most significant ingredient in his slice appears to be thickly whipped cream, which of course makes it very authentically German. The slab is gigantic, mouthwatering, covered in dark chocolate shavings, and sums up so much of what is marvellous about the world. "Yummy," as Portillo says.

Soon Portillo is heading north to Heidelberg, where I lived for a year in my early twenties. (I always knew this slide of Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof, taken while changing film rolls en route somewhere, would come in useful one day.) Here Portillo's theme of Romantic poetry continues. He wonders why the city has been such a pull to artists over the years, inspiring emotionally charged dramatic works from the likes of Turner to Brahms. An academic claims it has something to do with ruins being fashionable, and Heidelberg's ruined Schloss halfway up the Koenigsberg is certainly spot-on as far as ruins go. What Portillo doesn't know is that there is another ruin directly above where he is standing on the Philosophenweg - it's a former Nazi open-air theatre known as a Thingstaette, built to put on plays of Norse legends for the Volk of the 1930s, now abandoned and overgrown, and beyond creepy.

Heidelberg Schloss, spot on as ruins go

View of Heidelberg from the Philosophenweg

Nazi Thingstaette on the Heiligenberg

Portillo moves on via double-decker train to Frankfurt Main Hauptbahnhof, Germany's busiest railway station, which is a lot more architecturally appealing than Britain's busiest railway station, Clapham Junction. Portillo thinks we need more double-decker trains in Britain. He is possibly right. They could go a long way to solving commuter overcrowding.

Frankfurt Rathaus

In Frankfurt, Portillo visits the surprisingly silent and hi-tech stock exchange, meets a patronising TV journalist charged with explaining finance to the masses, and looks thoroughly undignified trying to get his chops round a Wurst. He also visits the Goethehaus to learn more about the man billed as Germany's Shakespeare.

Goethehaus

"Mainhatten" skyscrapers

European Central Bank

And then on to Goettingen, which is famous for its university. Most of what Portillo sees there he could have covered in Heidelberg, since that is also a city with an ancient university (older than Goettingen's) that has produced a number of Nobel-prize winning scientists and has a tradition of Borschenschaften (fraternities). Heidelberg also has a Studentenkarzer (prison) with the same black heads silhouetted on the walls by naughty students of the bygone age. And it has pubs full of pictures of fencing matches and men with facial scars.

Gaenseliesel, Goettingen, kissed and decorated by graduating students

But it turns out Portillo is really there to see Goettingen's wind tunnel, built in 1907 to aid the study of aerodynamics, so people could build aeroplanes less likely to fall out of the sky. Now the research centre has a model railway where people use a catapult to fire engines along a track at 400km/hour. They make the sleek high-speed ICE trains Portillo is using seem like clanking old steamies.

Hannover Rathaus

Portillo's final stop is Hannover, where I have only ever spent an afternoon. Portillo visits its spectacular Rathaus (city hall), which signifies Hannover's importance at the time of the Kaiser, when it was built. Given that I have a photograph of the view from the top of the Rathaus dome, I must also have travelled up the unusual curved lift with sloping floor that Portillo rides. Yet I have absolutely no memory of doing so. Maybe my host was feeling stingy and made me take the stairs. Maybe the lift was closed for refurbishment. Or maybe my vertigo just means I have blocked the experience out entirely.

View from Hannover Rathaus

My afternoon in Hannover was at the end of a month-long interrailing trip I took aged 25, finally done with study but not yet in the world of work. I was trying to brush up my German ready to seek employment. I travelled by train all the way from Luebeck in the north of Germany to Lugano in Italian-speaking Switzerland, which makes this the first of Portillo's railway journeys that I have covered in its entirety, and more. Thanks to the kindness of friends, I didn't pay for a single night's accommodation during the whole trip. I mostly slept on floors, with the odd blissful night on a futon (if such a thing is possible). In Lugano, I had to cram into a narrow single bed with a Danish architecture student. As it was the days before wifi and mobile internet, I finalised my itinerary by sending postcards from one destination to the next and making fleeting calls from coin-guzzling payphones. Yet I was always met on time at each station by whoever I was visiting: it seems that in the pre-Instagram era somehow we coped.

I always refer to the trip as "the march for open windows" owing to the Germans' fear of draughts and penchant for stuffy rooms, which made some of the long train journeys unbearable. In answer to Portillo's quest, for me, Germanness is about strange dichotomies. It's Ordnung surrounded by decadent cake. It's an open-door policy in the midst of blinding bureaucracy. It's the vegetarian health freak in a country whose restaurants serve up the Schlachtplatte (slaughter plate). It's the hypochondriac who on the one hand regularly takes a Kur, peers obsessively into a Flachspueler (stage toilet) and plays team sport, but chain smokes on the other. It's the cultural hybrid of someone who loves David Hasselhoff for his music as much as they do Beethoven. It's rimless glasses to see with, and men wearing jackets so brightly coloured that it's clear they don't use them. (Heck, some of them make Portillo's look if not stylish then at least very much at home.) But for all this, it's a place I love - and miss. If only for the cake.

Nigel Slater's Icing On The Cake

Yesterday's lemon & pistachio cake. Just because.

I have long been a fan of Nigel Slater's food writing. He can make the mundane utterly sublime. He can be eating sardines on toast yet give such an evocative description of every crumb that I instantly have to leap up and raid my larder to make some for myself. Well, I don't really have a larder per se. That's a bit posh. But I do have a few tins in a cupboard. When I've been organised about my online shopping.

Nigel Slater always strikes me as painfully shy on television. He sounds so exuberant on paper, but seems slightly awkward on screen. But his excitement over the food he has cooked for his plate is still infectious, and it always looks amazing, but makeable. And I also love his "food history" programmes, like this one about cake. I should call them "food nostalgia", because he has retained his childlike enthusiasm for the (probably actually not terribly inspiring) food of his youth despite the pretty miserable time his autobiography recounts him having. In this programme, the wicked gleam in his eye when he laughs as he bites into a fondant fancy is a telling image of the wonderful effect of food and how powerfully the senses of taste and smell recreate memories.

He starts in Konditor & Cook just behind Waterloo station, home of the most incredible lemon cake I have ever eaten. Nigel says he would just as happily buy a cake from a shop as eat a home-made one by Auntie Marjorie.(When did he meet my grandmother?) He stresses cake's universal appeal. It is the ultimate in comfort food in times of need. It doesn't have to meet Mary Berry's perfection. It just needs to be naughty but nice. But what makes a cake truly a cake?

There's a history bit. It all started with compacted porridge. There's a science bit. Why eggs bring the magic, originally whisked in by twigs. There's the religious affrontery and the banning of buns. There's why we have an innate liking for sweetness. There's a Home Economics lesson that teaches us that dropping cakes fresh out of the oven is actually good for them. There's what rationing did to cakes. Then there are just lots of glorious regional cakes with silly names - lardy, parkin, Rutland plum shuttles, Selkirk bannock, Norfolk vinegar, and Cumberland courting. (Never got one of those out of my husband.) There's the exceedingly crap ones we buy from Mr Kipling and Lyons - the aforementioned fondant fancies, Jamaica Ginger cake and a slice of Battenberg. Cake is what we do in this country to be sociable and make us smile. Or it was until we discovered binge-drinking.

Then Jenny Eclair comes on and tells Nigel why, despite being named after one, she hates cake. It's a throwback to her anorexic days at drama school. She claims cupcakes are the most evil of all - so disappointing and dishonest, so bad for you, as unnecessary and harmful as high-heeled shoes. Much as I personally love cake, I have to admit she does have a point. Cupcakes, piled high with swirls of buttercream and sweetie toppings, usually look so much better than they taste. The insurmountable icing invariably swamps a tiny morsel of dry sponge, and tips off onto the floor at the first bite.

Evil cupcakery

Finally, there's roadkill cake. (Yes, you did read that correctly.) There's cigarette butts on a cake. There's a fondant brains cake to teach people anatomy and fairy cakes decorated with chlamydia icing to educate teenagers about sexual health. And then a giant recreation of Nigel Slater's head. Not sure what he made of that.

But what makes a cake a cake? For Nigel Slater, it's the spirit behind it. The love that creates it. And the fact that we always share it.

It's impossible to deny that wherever I go, I eat cake. Grasmere Gingerbread in the Lake District,  Fat Rascals and macaroons from Betty's all over Yorkshire, Bara Brith in Pembrokeshire, Bakewell pudding in Derbyshire, brownies in Baltimore, Sachertorte in Vienna, tartes aux fraises in Paris, and pink-frosted cupcakes from a bakery on Bleecker Street in New York just like the ones Sarah Jessica Parker ate on Sex And The City (wearing stupid high-heeled shoes).

The winners will always be the Germans, however. Bakeries were the only shops open on a Sunday when I went to university in Heidelberg. Cake was the only thing that made me truly happy in a rather difficult year. There is much to be said for the healing powers of a bite of Apfelstrudel or a slice of Mohnkuchen or Streuselkuchen. Stollen at Christmas, washed down with Gluehwein from the Christkindlmarkt. But my favourite always - the simple baked Quark Kaesekuchen from the students cafe in Heidelberg's Marstallhof. It just about made up for the fact that everything else that the Mensa served was inedible - greasy gravy stodge with a side of cold fruit soup dolloped on to a metal tray. You weren't even allowed a plate. It was all stupidly cheap but utterly revolting. I still feel nauseous thinking about it. But the cheesecake was in another league.

Heidelberg,. The Marstallhof Mensa and Cafe is the building on the right

The Great British Bake-Off

I've been desperately clutching at straws to find an excuse to write about The Great British Bake-Off because, well, it's really all I'm watching at the moment. I love it. I am obsessed by it. And I know I am not alone. I wake up every Wednesday morning already excited about that evening's episode. (I'm sorry, but I have a young child and I take life's small pleasures whenever I can.) Usually, I want to eat everything they make (apart from the lavender meringue), though rarely believe I could attempt anything remotely similar. Nonetheless, I suck up all of Mary Berry's careful baking advice. And I have learned not to let Paul Hollywood's smugness wind me up any more. And while Mel and Sue's banter is getting ever more ridiculous, it's still making me snigger. As does Jo Brand's Extra Slice on a Friday night.

I don't think this sort of thing is allowed

But The Great British Bake-Off didn't really fit in with the required "travel memory" aspect of my blog. For starters, this series the tent has unhelpfully moved location to Welford Park in Berkshire. I have been on a few visits to Berkshire - and while these were generally confined to the M4 or the First Great Western railway, they include six to Windsor and Eton, two to Reading, and even one to Slough, but none to anywhere near Welford Park.

But my grandmother in Grasmere did once make us a Baked Alaska. I remember the day-long build-up to it being much more exciting than the end product. And not long ago, my friend Clare made Ryan's famous Key Lime Pie for Sunday lunch, and it was indeed as divine as Paul and Mary had claimed. But these links were all rather tenuous.

Then finally, last night during European Cakes Week, Sue got drunk on cake in South Jutland, Denmark and I thought, "I did that once at an 18th birthday party" (though the drunkenness in my case was all barbed-wire schnaps and not cake), and I was good to go.

So where were we last night? Bereft of Norman's dourness, we have been left with a mighty six of baking ingenuity: Luis, lovable Manc who always makes simply beautiful food. Martha, who has been on far too many skiing holidays for someone her age and is obviously at some sort of Swiss finishing school run by Betty's of Harrogate. Chetna, who has an annoying manner with a kitchen timer. Nancy, who is as down to earth as they come and dismisses Paul as "the male judge". Richard, who with his pencil still behind his ear is starting to show more typical British builder traits of unreliability. And finally Kate, last week's star baker, with her perfect curls and dreamy air. My husband said right at the start that none of them would be going home.

And what would "the male judge" say about this?

This week, everybody seems to be talking about winging it, even Martha, who is busy revising for exams. Nancy talks about her relevant experience and training - "I've had lots of European holidays, and I've probably eaten lots of cake, but not thought about how they're made or what they're called." Mel and Sue are simply talking in dodgy accents.

First up is a yeast-leavened cake. Lots of gigantic zig-zaggy tins are wielded. Mel says one looks like a piles cushion. German dialectal variation or just badly consistent spelling is in evidence in cake name captions. Nancy decides to bypass Europe entirely and go with a Caribbean theme somewhere along the lines of a Del Boy in Peckham pina colada. Kate is making an Israeli inspired cake, which she thinks is allowed because Israel takes part in Eurovision.

Then the technical challenge. Mary Berry's Swedish Princess Cake. It looks amazing. There is jam, creme patissiere, whipped cream, genoese sponge, more whipped cream, green marzipan, chocolate piping and a dainty rose on top. Thankfully, I've learned today that they serve them in the IKEA cafe, so I will be off to Batley shortly to buy one.

Then the showstopper, a Hungarian dobos torte, which involved dozens of stripey layers of sponge and ganache and ridiculous amounts of caramel artwork on top. Or that is the remit, anyway. Martha uses a mould to make chess pieces. Mary tuts. And Kate, because she felt that a two tiered cake looked too much "like a hat", decides to make an extra tier, which means she only has time to caramelise a few pistachios, which just simply isn't good enough, apparently. Whereas Richard's "bird", cut in inch-thick crude-cut toffee, gives him plenty of caramel, but looks like I'd made it. Meanwhile, Chetna is busy caramelising grapes. And masterful Luis makes a Hungarian style castle cage on a hill and still has about 20 minutes left to spare at the finish. He is shown calmly wiping down his work surface while all frantic hell breaks loose around him. "It's spectacular. It's what I call a showstopper," says Mary about the end result. Too right. "Sorry about destroying it," says Paul, merrily carving straight through with a giant knife.

There is no doubt that Kate and Richard have ballsed up. Richard's is the second cake of the day to be described as "sad". But Mary and the male judge can't decide which of Richard and Kate has ballsed up more. When really they can both be brilliant. I had hoped to see previously unseen footage of this heated debate on An Extra Slice on Friday night. But there was none. Maybe the battle was just too bloody. In any case, all six contestants get to live another day. A pasty day. David Cameron will be excited. Chetna's caramelised grapes leave her crowned star baker, even if she did commit the crime of making a Victoria rather than a Genoese sponge for her showstopper. Which must be up there with a soggy bottom, surely?

The cakes I gorged that day all those years ago in Denmark still linger in my memory. One involved layers of raspberry mousse between delicate slices of sponge, with little Danish flags on top. The other was small rectangles of perfect coconut sponge and with a sticky caramel topping.  So a good hint of the challenges on last night's Bake Off in both. And both absolutely ruined by those shots of Aalborg Akvavit.