When I was little, baking was a national obsession. Every afternoon the UK's ovens would be heated up ready for a tray or two of something cake-y or pastry-like to be slipped inside, for half an hour or so, before being scooped out, sliced and served up at the kitchen table as a teatime or suppertime treat. Perhaps some fruit cake, or a caramel slice, or an oaty flapjack, or just a small moist cupcake in its fluted paper wrapping. You know, the sort of home-baked delight that a much-loved grandmother might have given you alongside a glass of orange squash or a mug of instant Nescafe. Or that some dear old lady in a flowery hat might have served up on the refreshment stall at a bring and buy sale in a musty church hall. Mmm, chocolate crispie cake and shortbread. Be still my beating tastebuds.
But most people don't bake any more, because they think baking takes time and effort. It certainly involves a lot more washing up than going shopping and buying some cakes instead. I blame Mr Kipling, launched in 1967 with ready-cut Bakewell slices and mini Battenburgs, for kick-starting the rot. Why bake your own almond slices, caramel shortcake and tiffin when some big factory could fill a six-pack for you? For most of us, baking became just too much effort. And now, in the Convenience Age, it seems that we've all completely caved in. Food manufacturers know that we can't resist a slice of cake or a chocolate brownie, especially at any location where hot drinks are sold, and have taken steps to exploit our inner weakness.
Enter the "traybake". There they sit near the cash till, identical small slabs of moulded carbohydrate shrink-wrapped in plastic. See how moist they look. Look at the currants and chocolate chips sprinkled liberally throughout each pastry slice. Imagine those succulent stodgy crumbs slipping down your throat and resting snugly in your stomach. Perhaps best not to look at the list of ingredients printed in tiny writing on the back of the wrapper - emulsifiers, stabilisers, saturated fats, etc - or to check out the unnaturally distant sell-by-date somewhere in the middle of next year. The manufacturers, and the catering establishments in which they sell their wares, just want you to stop and buy one. Mmmm, traybake.
But have you seen the prices they're charging? £1.15 for a small square of pecan & maple syrup flapjack. £1.95 for an individually wrapped organic walnut brownie. £2.20 for a three-bite chunk of chocolate caramel shortbread. I see consumer sheep picking up these pseudo-homemade nibbles every day in the canteen at work, without ever stopping to think what appalling value for money they are. The catering company simply sticks a few easy-to-come-by ingredients into an industrial oven, waits half an hour, and then cuts up the resulting rectangular slab into tiny £1 squares. Easy money. Fancy more profit? Just cut the squares a little smaller, they'll still get eaten. It's nothing more than a modern version of the old catering trick of dividing a restaurant gateau into 20 slices and charging a fiver for each.
I don't care how tasty the ingredients, I hereby pledge never to purchase a mass-produced machine-sliced individually wrapped cake-y chunk. Not at work, not at Starbucks, not at a station kiosk, not anywhere. Join me and "Just say no to traybakes".
