Name: School dinner cake.
Age: Fresh today, or possibly left over from the 80s.
Appearance: White, cuboid, be-sprinkled, delicious.
You eat it, do you? You don’t just eat it – you look forward to Friday because of it.
I thought you looked forward to Friday because of Saturday. What’s in this amazing cake? It’s actually a pretty standard traybake sponge – flour, sugar, eggs, margarine – topped with white icing and multicoloured sprinkles.
Sounds a little underwhelming, if you ask me. Ah, but it also contains a magical, secret ingredient that makes people crave it.
Cocaine? No. Nostalgia.
You mean you imagine it tastes better then it actually does, because you remember it from a long time ago, before we had nice things? Precisely: it’s the retreat to the familiar in times of trouble.
Funny, you would have thought Covid would have driven people straight to school dinner cake. It has: #schooldinnercake featured in 20,000 Instagram posts in just the last fortnight, and recipes now abound on the internet.
But Covid started, like, a year ago. And actually the first mentions of school dinner cake in association with lockdown did, too, way back in April last year.
I suppose there are other school foods people have also waxed nostalgic about over lockdown. To a lesser extent, yes: fish fingers, cauliflower cheese, cornflake tart, Arctic roll …
Ooh, Arctic roll. … rice pudding with jam, potato smiley faces, square pizza …
Whale meat? Not so much, no.
You know what I’ve suddenly got a massive craving for? Turkey Twizzlers! I’ve got a cure for that: a plateful of Turkey Twizzlers.
What about turkey dinosaurs? Now you’re talking. But nothing seems to have the same powerful, cross-generational pull of the humble school dinner cake.
How did school dinner cake first become associated with school? That’s unclear, but the recipe bears more than a passing resemblance to Tottenham cake. Although Tottenham cake traditionally has pink icing, whereas school dinner cake is traditionally served with a weirdly thin, pink custard.
I presume Tottenham cake comes from London. From the early 20th-century bakery of the Quaker Henry Chalkley, to be precise. The cake was handed out free to schoolchildren when Tottenham Hotspur first won the FA Cup in 1901.
Funny. Do they give out red leicester cheese when Leicester City win the FA Cup? We may never find out.
Do say: “Please, please let my kids go back to school – I’m so sick of making stupid cakes.”
Don’t say: “I really miss the teriyaki lamb from my school days at Harrow.”
