Why bother?

Last week I attended one of my two book groups. It's a daytime one and we have lunch at the end of it, provided by our hostess of the day. On this particular occasion our hostess, who is recovering from major surgery, was not up to baking a cake and so served a Coles flourless orange cake. And I have to say that it was delicious, and made me a little dismayed. I went away thinking why do I bother making my own?

For Claudia Roden's recipe for this beautiful cake is one of my go to recipes. It is almost foolproof and very, very easy. You just have to allow time to boil the oranges (2 hours). If you just Google 'Claudia Roden's orange cake' you will find the recipe. I must admit I cut corners even more than most of the recipe versions and once I have cooked the oranges, and chopped them I just put everything in the food processor together (well you need to cool the oranges a little bit first). It's absolutely delicious - moist, sweet but with a touch of tartness and very orangey and, moreover, it is gluten free, so you can serve it to all of your gluten intolerant friends. (There seem to be more and more of them.)

So is my version better than Coles'? Well not really. At first I thought, well I bet it's loaded with preservatives and additives. But no apparently not - well hardly. Here is the label (found online) with the list of ingredients. And now that I look at it I feel marginally better but not much.

Raising agents (450, 500) - are nameless so might not just be baking powder I thought. So I looked at the label of my baking powder and found that 500 is bicarbonate of soda and 450 is sodium something and that these two are essentially what baking powder is, so raising agents is indeed baking powder. Gelling agents (440, 407)? These are pectin (440) and carrageenan (407) which is an emulsifier extracted from red seaweed - which doesn't sound all that bad. Besides, that's in the glaze which the original recipe does not have. Otherwise the ingredients are the same - well not the glaze and the orange slices - but that's just the decoration - the pistachios too. The bit at the bottom that says all sorts of other things may be present is probably just Coles covering themselves. Again, my guess, and it is a guess, is that this is there because the same machines that have made the cake (even though it's labelled as hand crafted), may have been contaminated with those substances.

I'm not sure about the percentages though. They don't add up but maybe somebody with a more mathematical mind could explain it. So is there really something sneaky and underhand going on here?

Essentially though what we seem to have is more or less an exact copy of the Claudia Roden recipe. Moreover because of this it has a short shelf life and is therefore not available before 2.00 pm. It costs $16.00 and is smaller than the cake you get from the original recipe. So it is more expensive (not that I've done the sums - and of course it would be), but you haven't had to do anything other than go to your local Coles store and extract the cake from the refrigerated cabinet in which it is stored. And pay. It's hard to argue that the extra effort is worth it if you are a busy housewife, or believe yourself to be a lousy cook.

So why shall I continue to make my own? For I shall. Is it vanity? Is it a deep, and maybe unfair suspicion of pre-made supermarket products? Is it snobbishness? Is it purely practical? My own version is larger after all. Is it stinginess? Surely my version is cheaper, though I can't be bothered to do the sums. Do I do it for fun and personal satisfaction? Well I guess it's a combination of all these things. But it does show, does it not that mass manufactured products have come a very long way from my childhood.

And the other thing to note is that this is a recipe that has become a 'classic'. It was first published back in 1968. Prior to that it was the dark ages as far as cooking was concerned in post-war Britain, until those pioneers like Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Robert Carrier changed things. A middle-eastern cake would have been incredibly exotic, but it's ease of making and delicious taste quickly wormed its way into our hearts - so much so that you find it in cafés everywhere and probably almost anyone who cooks at least a bit, has made it. So maybe it was inevitable that the supermarkets should jump onto the bandwagon. They all have their 'super' home brands - and this cake is part of the 'Coles Finest' catalogue. And all that fuss about gluten free must have played its part too. Mind you I wonder if it's supply is restricted to areas with the right demographic. Maybe it doesn't exist in the Coles stores of Melbourne's poorer suburbs. But that's a topic for another day. Woolworths, by the way, does not seem to have a version - though they do have a recipe online.

Ultimately I'm not sure whether I should be cheered by this development - 'real' cakes in the supermarket - or dismayed that I am no longer going to be a star when I produce my own version!