In The Wake Of A Cake

We baked a Madera cake, the Doc and me, I’ve never been to Madera, neither had she: and the chilli? I’ve never been to Chile.  I’ve got to change my eating habits so that if I eat a place-name-cake, I have to visit its namesake. From now on I aim to travel in the wake of my cake.

Why? Because I’ve eaten Dundee cake, but never visited Dundee. Chorley cake. Never seen the place. Eccles cakes, I’ve eaten hundreds – have even been blindfolded by Eccles cakes – but I’ve never set foot in Eccles. I’ve eaten poppy-seed cake Heidelburg and the most wonderful Quark cake in Freiburg (from a market stall, beneath the Munster). And at one time (in 1980s) you couldn’t get me out of Battenburg cake coloured tights (wore them for climbing). If you eat a cake you should travel in its wake.

Coda: concerning the Joycean quark cake (a couple of blogs back). James Joyce coined the word quark, in Finnegan’s Wake: “ Three quarks for Muster Mark/ Sure he has not got much of a bark/And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark”.