Tomato soup cake

I am far from the only person I know who read the 'Baking with Sylvia' article in the Guardian last week, but I think I was the only one who really took it seriously.

It is about how she saw baking as therapeutic and consoling -- something precise and measured and achievable and warm in a hostile world. I have often felt the same about cooking. Not the getting in late have to eat fast kind of cooking, nor the feeling like a dobber trying not to use butter kind of cooking, but the kind of cooking where you have plenty of time and a real feel for what you want to make.

I am quite a good cook, if I say so myself. In theory it's the kind of thing anyone can be good at if they put in the hours, but in practice I do think there's something more to it. It's a bit like gardening, only on a completely different timescale. Creative, satisfying, and a way of caring for a part of yourself that needs to feel grounded and that it is dealing with known quantities. You also need people to cook *for* (cooking for one is no good at all), but I do it as much for myself as anyone else.

So it was interesting to read about Sylvia Plath's baking, and although baking is not my usual thing, I decided to make her tomato soup cake with the conveniently provided recipe. I had some mellow music (Holly Cole's Dark Dear Heart), it was Sunday afternoon, chill out, contemplate, bake.

Only it didn't quite happen like that. S's sister and her three children are staying this weekend, and if you are a four year old girl there is nothing like the prospect of making a cake to get you excited. So S and the small person became my assistants, we had flour and sugar everywhere and I had to belt out to the shops for more eggs as we had scrambled about a thousand of them for breakfast. The tomato soup became a secret ingredient that everyone had to try and guess, and there was about five times as much cream cheese frosting as you could possibly want to eat if you hoped to hold on to your teeth.

So it was not the introspective cake it should have been, but it was a big hit nonetheless, except with the person who is at an age where he only eats sausages and other things made of mechanically recovered meat. I wonder what Sylvia would have made of it?

joella