Have your cake and eat it

This week's column is by Audio Editor Rita Forbes.

Writing about the tradition of wedding cakes for our April issue seemed a challenging assignment at first. I'm not married (no wedding cake of my own), and I'm not British (no personal connection to the royal wedding). But I dove into the research wholeheartedly. I read up on the subject, and I talked to professional cake makers and a food historian.

My research didn't stop there, though. You see, it gradually became clear that I possessed a very important qualification for writing about this particular topic: Of all the Spotlight staff, I'm the one with the biggest sweet tooth.

It's important for writing to have an authentic tone, isn't it? To get into the right frame of mind, I went to the local bakery and came back to my keyboard with a piece of cake. It may not be good manners, but I wrote this story with my mouth full.

The history of the wedding cake surprised me, and it will surprise you. I don't want to spoil your appetite for it by revealing too much, but a 17th-century wedding cake could contain some surprise ingredients: lamb's testicles, for example, or even live birds! Just for fun.

While writing this story, I realized that there is more than one way to have your mouth full of cake. There are some fabulous cake idioms in English. If you have a sweet tooth like me, try using some of these in conversation. You could use the words on the left... but the expressions on the right are so much sweeter, don't you think?

*Read my article in the April edition of Spotlight magazine.
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