A recipe a day: apple cake

I think it's fair to say that baking, like public speaking or the ability to hit a rounders ball, does not come naturally to everyone. Despite the sugar-dusted furore into which the country was swept during the heyday of the Great British Bake Off, I'm sure I can't be the only person who finds our cherished national pastime uniquely stressful. Quite frankly, just the idea of piping pearls of icing onto a Christmas cake, or whisking caramel into golden strands for a pile of profiteroles is enough to bring me out in a cold sweat. Not because I am incapable of doing so: after all, if you can follow a recipe, logic would suggest that you can bake something reasonably well. What I lack is confidence: unlike with cooking, I do not feel I have the ability to judge the readiness of a sponge from the merest of presses, or the skill to know at exactly which point one must cease to whisk the egg whites. It's partly due to lack of practice but also, I believe, the result of some truly traumatic home economics classes. 

Being an old fashioned institution, baking was considered the most solid foundation for one's culinary education at my school. The task in our first practical lesson was to bake fairy cakes, a recipe so simple it would be well within the capabilities of an eight year old, never mind a teenager. I had rarely been let loose in the kitchen up to that point, and the thought of using an electric whisk unsupervised was absolutely terrifying. Even more frightening was the teacher: Mrs G, a small but formidable woman, who bellowed across the kitchen at the merest hint of clumsiness or misdemeanour from her students. I was so scared I couldn't even crack the eggs properly: rather than sploshing neatly into my plastic jug, they seeped all over the work surface and dribbled miserably onto the floor. 

All in all it was a horrific 90 minutes, resulting in three telling-offs and 12 very sad-looking fairy cakes, splattered with haphazard drizzles of lumpy icing. Mrs G marched over to my worktop, clipboard in hand, poised to give the final mark out of ten. She looked icily down her half moon spectacles at my poor excuses for baked goods. "Six," she sniffed, before turning to the exquisitely decorated morsels crafted by one of my peers, beaming as though they were nothing short of the sponge equivalent of the Mona Lisa. I burned in shame, feeling that I had failed some important test of girlhood.

The sensation did not abate in the lessons that followed, which can only be described as a catalogue of culinary disasters. There was the pineapple upside down cake, when I used the wrong kind of sugar and burnt it all spectacularly, and then the Swiss roll, when I got confused about marking the baking paper and ended up getting pencil on the sponge. And let's not even mention the catastrophe that was the gingerbread, which, once it emerged brown and solid from the oven, could easily have been mistaken for a sample from a geology lab. I never managed a mark higher than seven, and, surrounded by champion aesthetes, I genuinely believed I was incapable. 

Thankfully the experience was not enough to keep me out of the kitchen for life, and I continued to bake at home. As I became a better cook, my confidence grew, and I began to appreciate that the best bit of baking is doing it for someone else. I will not begin to try and analyse here what it is about sugar, butter and flour that seems to soothe the soul, but I think it's fair to say that, in general, eating cake makes people happy. And baking for others makes me happier still: seeing someone's smiling face when they are presented with a tin of buttery shortbread, a stack of sticky flapjacks or a squishy banana bread is worth every moment of kitchen stress. 

As a result, about two weeks into my recipe challenge, I found myself baking for a group of strangers. The occasion was Cookbook Club at Borough Market, an initiative kick-started by food writer and sensational dresser Angela Clutton, who is a close friend of mine. Every month, members gather at the market to celebrate one predesignated cookery book, bringing with them one of the dishes listed therein. It is a fantastic forum for foodie discussion, in which participants discuss the book and their experiences cooking from it. Crucially, everyone gets a chance to try all the food, and has the opportunity to meet like-minded people and exchange ideas and experiences. Angela recently organised a drop-in event, in which members were encouraged to bake something from any of the books featured so far. I had not attended an event as yet, and I felt it was high time to get involved in such a brilliant project. 

So. What to bake? The decision was made relatively easy given that I possess only one of the relevant books: Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries. The book details what Nigel (am I allowed to call him by his first name?) ate over the course of a year, with stories and recipes included. This seemed wholly appropriate given my recipe challenge, and so I scanned the index eagerly for potential cakes. An entry for October included a recipe for apple cake, and, with a bag of disappointing Coxes in the fruit bowl (what possessed me to buy apples in July?) and plenty of caster sugar to spare, I quickly decided that this was the one.

Conscious that I was cooking for gastronomically-literate strangers, I felt particularly nervous as I took out the mixing bowl. This was not the time for foolish errors. Thankfully the formula is relatively straightforward: you cream the butter and sugar, add the flour, then whisk in the eggs. You top this mixture with spiced apples, dust with sugar and breadcrumbs and put it straight in the oven. It's the kind of cake my mum could knock up in fifteen minutes, but I wanted to take my time: like most things in life, baking is infinitely more pleasurable when you are not rushed. As I watched the butter and sugar meld into a sunny yellow cream, it occurred to me that the recipe was almost an exact replica of those first fairy cakes I made at school. But with a cup of tea in hand, and no teacher shouting over my shoulder, this time I enjoyed myself. And I didn't spill the egg.

By some miracle (and copious amounts of aluminium foil) both myself and the cake managed the journey to Borough Market in one piece. I was extremely apprehensive, but shortly after arriving at the event, I realised that my fears were unfounded. A group of women gathered around a long wooden table, laden with patterned baking tins and stacks of cookbooks. Shaking slightly, I introduced myself and proffered my squashy package of cake, hoping against hope that it didn't taste as awful as it looked. Glancing at the homemade amaretti, sumptuous-looking raspberry and almond tart and immaculately presented yoghurt and orange sponge, my meek apple cake seemed distinctly school fête-ish. To my surprise, everyone seemed quite excited by it (or perhaps Nigel Slater just brings out the best in people) and they encouraged me to join them at the table. Cafetieres and napkins were passed around as everyone helped themselves to slices of cake, and the conversation turned from baking to Brexit to business and back again. Everyone came from different backgrounds and brought a myriad of different experiences (both food and life-related) to the table, and we whiled away several hours together, only getting up to reboil the kettle every so often. 

When I finally got round to trying a slice of the apple cake, I was pleasantly surprised. It may have been the least photogenic option on the table, but the sponge wasn't half bad. Golden and fluffy, it tasted exactly like a fairy cake, the spongy apples rendered appealing under their blanket of cinnamon and breadcrumbs. The result was soft and soothing, as cake should be. I smiled and looked around. I was surrounded by women chatting and laughing as though they had known one another for years, rather than a few short hours. Seeing this newfound camaraderie and good cheer, it occurred to me that baking is not really about manicured icing or perfectly round biscuits. It's about who you share it with, and feeling that, somehow, everything will be ok. 

Header image provided by Eve Milner: @followthisguide