Tuesday, wrote Mr Kipling…

…and I believe he was onto something, though to my knowledge he never kept a diary beyond a few saucy notes written in raspberry jam on the underside of a Battenberg.

Today, my thoughts — like a poorly balanced Victoria sponge — are firmly tilted toward cake.

There are many things I have loved in this life: a well-worn trowel, the smell of paraffin on a Tuesday, that unforgettable summer of 1957 when I briefly joined a travelling onion choir. But towering above them all — figuratively and often literally — is cake.

I have been baking since I was old enough to misread the word “flour” as “floor” and nearly burnt down the village hall attempting a linoleum cobbler. I’ve made cakes in camp kettles, cakes shaped like alarming organs (thanks to my brief stint with the Anatomical Bake-Off Society), and once, by accident, a scone that was legally classified as a weapon.

But oh — that lovely young Mary Berry.
There are saints less beatific.
A woman of calm resolve, capable of taming a genoise with a mere glance and delivering a withering verdict on soggy bottoms with the delicate power of a falling petal. I wrote her seventeen letters once in my youth, all sealed with marmalade. She never replied, but I like to think she smelled them. That’s enough for me.

It is perhaps improper to admit, but I once had a dream that Mary Berry and I were trapped together in a rain-soaked summerhouse with only a bag of self-raising and some contraband kirsch. She whispered “whisk faster, Virgil,” and I woke up in a sweat, clutching an overworked Swiss roll and sobbing into a tea towel embroidered with the phrase Choux Happens.

I keep a small framed photograph of her beside the oven, and sometimes, before I whisk, I salute it with my spatula. It feels right. It feels holy.

This week I am experimenting with an Ectoplasmic Drizzle Cake — lighter than air, unsettlingly warm to the touch, and prone to vanishing entirely when left unattended near lace curtains. Possibly haunted. I’m undecided.

You know, some people find their gods in churches. I find mine in a perfectly layered trifle, softly glowing under the fridge light like a promise of better times.

If ever I’m taken ill, just write “Mary Berry” in icing across my chest and lower me into a sponge.

More baked revelations soon,
– Virgil Twobyfour
Still banned from the Argyle Home Economics Society for trying to summon a Victorian angel food cake using only a whisk and his own shame.