Nanas know best

I was lucky enough to grow up with my immediate family living close by. My Nanny and Grandad lived in the next street and my Grandma and Grandpop lived just down the road.

When I wasn’t at home (which wasn’t often) I would be at one of my grandparents. As my Nan’s house was on the way home from school, I was usually there. In fact, I was there so often that I would hide behind my Nan’s kitchen door when my granddad came home from work, and when he entered the house you could hear him grumbling “is he here again?”

I don’t think he meant it.... most of the time, but now I’m older I can fully understand if he did.

Anyway, I’m at my Nan’s. By day she works as a cook at the local village hospital. By afternoon, she’s a baker. She bakes cakes. Proper cakes. Wedding cakes, birthday cakes and celebration cakes. She uses royal icing applied in layers with a spirit level and the bumps removed with sand paper; none of the ‘just roll’ icing that’s used today. She makes fondant flowers and leaves, chocolate curls and coloured coconut. As grandchildren, we got to choose which birthday cake we wanted her to make.

Being at Nan’s was a watch-don’t-eat situation. I’d wait patiently in the corner watching and waiting for the coveted bowl and “whiskers” to lick while the next layer was added to the wedding cake that she was creating. She didn’t make the cakes as a business but something she’d do for a friend of a friend of a friend so it was more of an education than a learning curve, but something I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at some day.

Grandmas on the other hand was a totally different experience. Baking was for fun and we ate whatever we had made as soon as it was cool enough not to burn our mouths. There was very little if any left when grandpops came home from his allotment with his woolly pom-pom hat on. Biscuits, cakes, scones and sweets were all on the menu here.

I remember I had a cook book at Grans for children. One of the recipes was for honeycomb. Heating a saucepan of sugar until it was as hot as lava, then adding bicarb of soda so that the boiling hot lava foamed up and nearly escaped the pan, then carefully pouring it into a baking tray to cool before bashing it up with a hammer. All this from a children’s cook book. Health and safety hadn’t been invented yet, neither had salmonella. More bowls and whiskers of raw ingredient for me and Gran to lick then!

Gran taught me a very important lesson in that there is no point eating healthy food if you don’t enjoy it. If you want a proper dinner then it has to be meat and two veg with proper gravy, or a proper roast with all the trimmings or homemade chips cooked in hot lard... All in consideration of course, and none of this convenience rubbish that is available today. Gran was however, surprisingly partial to a Chinese take away every now and then.

Sadly they have now gone to a greater place and they are missed dearly but I am going to try and carry on the traditions of bakers in my family.