After a year of baking for the office every month, I’ve now retired as the Secret Baker.  There are a number of reasons for this:

1. My original plan last December was to get people smiling and talking to each other.  I’m sure it would have happened anyway, but I’m definitely having more conversations with people, and I know there were discussions about who was behind the cakes going on, so it did work to some degree :o)
2. It takes ages to make 3-4 cakes at the same time when your oven has a mind of its own.  And it makes a lot of mess, especially when you are as chaotic in the kitchen as I am.
3. 3-4 cakes are really hard to juggle on a 2 hour commute.  Yesterdays offering was so heavy and in danger of entirely collapsing that I had to take a taxi rather than walk the last 30 minutes, and I never take taxis in London.  (Although perhaps I should, I had a great conversation with the diver, discussing whether his plan B of being a gigolo would be a more lucrative career, and when I got out he thanked me for being so much fun – that much laughing at 7am is a pretty good way to start a Monday :o) )

So I retired from this:

But that wasn’t the only baking I did this weekend; I made a cake to take to friends on Saturday night and one for the family pudding on Sunday (these both had a secret ingredient that you’d never guess).  And I made some biscuits for a school Christmas fair.  And I made a bit of a mess, because I tried to combine too many things to save time:

Everything kind of got everywhere.  And when Sister 1 came to Pog Towers yesterday for Big House Day, I received this on Facebook:

Maybe I should retire from baking full stop.  But all the cake did go down quite well, and it took everyone a lot of clues to work out that secret ingredient…which, weirdly,  Norman liked too (you’ll have already seen this picture if you’re following the pog blog facebook page):

Yes, really :o)