Hurrah for the random Internet with which I am presently blessed.

Since I haven’t lost the connection, I am going to write about cakes and biscuits as I have been thinking about them recently. Some of the Things that I moved to this home from my last include a (by now inedible) special-edition cake acquired at Bobby Baker’s talk last year, and a similarly ancient, preserved-by-virtue-of-sugar biscuit that Sam made for Mark and I last Easter, involving two pig faces in a red icing heart. (Let us not analyse that image.) My retention of these cakes was partly inspired by the cake collection featured in Taking things seriously;

Of the thirty or so cupcakes I collected over the next six years, my favourites were the ones where the frosting played a crucial role in the overall presentation…After a few weeks the cupcakes would harden, crossing the line from confection to decor. – Mimi Lipson, Taking things seriously

As well as being faced with my own petrified sweet things during The Move it was impossible not to notice the prevalence of All Things Cake at Zinefest yesterday.

The Great Cake Escape stall at Zinefest.

The Great Cake Escape were there in full force, their presence amplified by many images of sweet cupcake type things in Zines. There was even a disturbing cartoon featuring a malevolent cupcake stabbing a fried egg to death.

Malevolent Cupcake.

I have been doing a spot of baking myself, though the subject here is biscuits, not cake. But icing and sprinkles feature heavily in the design of things.

My biscuits are forming the basis for a series of alternative Valentines’ Day cards to be featured in the forthcoming LOVE IS AWESOME exhibition and the intention – as with the LOVE IS AWESOME poster – is to subvert the expectations associated with a certain type of (sweet) imagery, and to convey a more complicated and conflicted message about LOVE than that perpetrated by giant, giftcard-mongers.

The Great Cake Escape are also doing some kind of Valentine themed cake-themed intervention, though I am not certain how ironic this is going to be.

And I do not know how best to display/celebrate/curate my by now incredibly stale museum of confection. What I do know is that at the moment I am interested in The Dark Side of baking; the mouldy, awkward, uncomfortable, artificial, difficult, feminist-complex, guilty, desirous revulsion of it all.

What an epic medium.