大象传媒

Dad kept a grocery shop in Aldershot. During wartime, he dreaded Christmas. Customers clamoured for extra items, especially dried fruit for cakes and puddings.

Mum, Dad and I stayed up late to weigh up quarter pounds (125g) of mixed unwashed sultanas and currants, knowing well that everyone would grumble and groan at the mere handful, nowhere near enough to make a cake or a pudding.

In 1943, Dad unwisely took orders for Christmas cakes. These were promised by his bread suppliers, a large national bakery firm. They delivered one iced fruity Christmas cake, one un-iced fruit cake and six plain cakes. Dad had orders for 20 cakes so his first task was to decide which 12 people would be told just two days before Christmas that there was no cake for them.

The next problem was to turn the remaining seven cakes into something looking vaguely like Christmas cakes. Mum and I got he job of icing and decorating. (I was 11 years old.) To do seven cakes in one day would be hard with all the resources available now; to do it in 1943 was nigh on impossible.

Emergency cream and marzipan

Our first thought was to make the plain cakes tastier by putting a layer of 'cream' in the middle. Real cream was not available in wartime, so we used a recipe for 'emergency cream' which went like this: 'Heat 1/2 pint water, melt a tablespoon of unsalted margarine in it. Sprinkle three heaped tablespoons of National Dried Milk into this and beat, then whisk. Add one teaspoon sugar and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence. Leave to get very cold.'

Well! You can imagine how ghastly that tasted. It was also very lumpy. But the far more difficult problem was to devise some substitute for marzipan. There were no ground almonds, nor fresh eggs. We used water, dried egg, soya flour and almond essence. The resultant paste was a brilliant yellow. The combination of soya and almond essence gave off a strong bitter aroma, which might pass for the smell of marzipan provided it was breathed through a gas mask.

The paste was suspiciously sticky. Mum and I took a cake each and literally stuck to our task. We scraped the paste off our fingers and pressed it on the cakes. As fast as we put it on it rolled off, falling around each cake like the flabby folds of a fat stomach. Every time we pushed the paste back we rubbed off some of the cake. Although the cakes got smaller, there was the advantage that that the paste got thicker with the rubbed-off crumbs and eventually stayed in place.

Very unsatisfied customers

At last we had a row of cakes, admittedly grubby-looking and strangely dome-shaped. All they needed was a final glossy coating to give them a professional finish, boards to rest upon and a bit of ribbon! Looking at them, Mum and I were seized by nervous giggles. Miraculously we had some icing sugar, and by mixing it with water to a concrete-like consistency, we were able to put a passable rough coating over the domes. They looked like storm-tossed beehives. We hadn't the nerve to put 'Happy Christmas' on top.

When Dad came to admire our handiwork we knew it was time to quit. We beat a hasty retreat to the pictures. After Christmas, every customer who had one of our unique cakes complained... about the unconventional shape, lack of fruit, messy cream centre, the repellent marzipan and, above all, about the tiny nugget of cake so difficult to find under its monstrous dome.

Dad, stung by their ingratitude, had only one reply: 'Don't you know there's a war on?'

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