Maestro... please!

I haven't done a vast amount in the way of cake decorating. My mother was always the expert on that (she doesn't do it any more, being 86 and not too steady on her feet), and she used to do some real show-stoppers. However, this isn't by any means the best one I've done; it's just the only one for which I still have a photograph. And it does have an anecdote to go with it, and who doesn't like an anecdote?

As previously mentioned, I was in the habit of baking for concerts, because making music is hungry work. I became pretty well known for it. Some of the finest names in baroque music used to rejoice when they saw me approaching with a Tupperware container. And this particular concert was in Ghent, back in 2011; and I'd recently acquired this book by Nigella Lawson with a recipe in it I was particularly keen to try out. I should add that I was just vegetarian at the time, not vegan, because although a vegan version of this wouldn't be impossible, it would take some skill to get right. It was an amazing layered chocolate meringue creation that I was quite sure the musicians were going to love.

So I did a test run on my work colleagues. (They really loved the fact that I went to a lot of concerts!) The meringue creation was received with great enthusiasm, but one thing did become apparent, and that was that the chocolate custard was inclined to soak into the meringue if you left it too long. I thought to myself, well, no problem; it's not as if I could carry the finished creation on the Eurostar in any case. What I'll need to do is make the discs of meringue, with perhaps a few extra in case of breakage en route, and the custard, carry them separately, and then assemble the whole thing just before the concert, or, even better, during the interval.

That, of course, meant I'd have to have somewhere to do it; so I e-mailed the ensemble to explain what I was planning and enquire about arrangements. I got a very rapid, and indeed panicked, reply from The Maestro himself; and what The Maestro had to say was "please don't!"

You see, The Maestro did not appear to think very well of his musicians. He seemed to imagine they all ate like a pack of two-year-olds. He was afraid they would make a terrible mess, and then the people at the venue would be cross, and they would never get asked back again. So I e-mailed him back, and I have to say it took a great and mighty effort of will not to tell him to keep his hair on. I said, "Fine, no problem. I shall just bring a cake."

So a cake was what I brought, and this was it. I put the chocolate coating on in England and did the marzipan decoration at the other end (I can't remember whether or not there was also marzipan under the chocolate, but there were certainly ground almonds in the cake, as it was a flourless recipe). You get the toning browns by adding progressively more cocoa powder. (Odd story: when I was a child, my mother took it as an article of faith that cocoa powder had to be cooked. I don't know what she thought would happen if it wasn't, but I do remember being very puzzled at the time because I knew that you could get things dusted in cocoa powder and I was fairly sure that the people who sold these things didn't put the cocoa powder in the oven first. To be fair, she probably had this strange piece of information handed down from her own mother, who wasn't always very logical.) I hadn't made roses with marzipan before, but I had with sugar paste - I once did someone a birthday cake that was covered in sugar-paste roses, and they thought it was terribly clever, and I said "no, just a bit fiddly" - and it's exactly the same technique. A moulded rose is very easy indeed. You just make a spike for the centre, mould the petals individually, fix them on round the edges so they overlap a bit, and tweak the edges outwards. Done.

Thirteen years later I had occasion to remind d'Artagnan of all this, and he smiled beatifically and replied, "I have forgotten everything about that concert... but I do remember the cake!"

I'm flattered, but I'm not entirely surprised; he does have a tendency to clear out the less pleasant memories (part and parcel of the fact that he never bears a grudge), and I'm afraid The Maestro probably didn't make it easy for either him or any of the other musicians. When I actually met The Maestro, I didn't take to him at all, and I was surprised at that because most of the baroque and early music people I meet are great; but he turned out to be very brusque and off-hand with his musicians, and eventually he got into some quite serious trouble, the nature of which I won't mention to avoid identifying him. But they all seemed to enjoy the cake, so I'm glad I brought it.

Actually, I think the best piece of cake decoration I ever did was the illuminated manuscript cake. A rectangular cake is the perfect shape to be got up as an open book, and so I decided to go all Book of Kells for some long-forgotten church raffle (it was one of the prizes). Mum was always very good at piped decorations, but I've never liked doing them that much; I'd rather either mould them (like the roses) or use a paintbrush, and the book was pretty much entirely paintbrush work, though I might have moulded some trims to look like the edges of the cover. Sadly at that point I didn't even own a camera, so there's no photo - or at least if there is, it'll be in the house of whoever won it in the raffle, and I never did find out who that was.

I could always do that again, I suppose, though I'd have to borrow someone's oven, because I don't have a rectangular dish or cake tin that will fit in my air fryer. I prefer marzipan to icing (more flavour and not half so sickly sweet), but that takes a paintbrush as well as icing does. I just need an occasion. My present church doesn't have raffles, so that's out.

And the meringue creation? Oh, I haven't forgotten that. One day I'll devise a good vegan version!