You can have your cake... and eat it

Oct 4 2011 Advertisement Feature

Cakes come in all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes and sizes. There are cake recipes for the Victoria sponge, the black forest gateau, buns, cream cakes and pastries. 

There are cupcakes, rabbit-shapes and stacked marvels. They are covered with silver sparkles, adorned with rice paper and sprinkled with powdered sugar. They are mixed with sweet potato and beetroot to create the perfect taste.

It is this wide breadth of options and versatility that makes the cake so endearingly fun to make – that and the fact that they can be devilishly difficult to construct successfully. Oh, and the fact that you get to eat them afterwards.

Of course, the stronger the chef, the more challenging the cake-related endeavour they'll set themselves. This does not always make for easy or credible recipe-location online.

Indeed, the number of self-proclaimed Hestons out there (whose crude attempts to conjoin horrifying culinary combinations with the imagined results of a triple-starred Michelin miracle) is worryingly large. But sometimes it's just too tempting to try something new.

Which is why it's best to go to trusted sources with a proven track record in different, exciting recipes that work. Waitrose has a number of suggestions for cake recipes that should keep you busy - and more than a little messy - for quite some time.