A piece of cake

Britons are often disappointed by Spanish cakes. You pass a cake shop and there are all sorts of incredibly appealing cakes and buns with reds and greens and cream and pastry and they look really tasty. But they aren't. The cream isn't real, it tastes of nothing much. The pastry is too flaky or there's too much of it and the coloured bits are just sugary.

Now it would be an untruth to say there aren't any nice cakes, pastries or buns in Spain. I really like lots of the traditional stuff. Bizcocho, for instance, is a sponge cake and there are lots of variations on bizcocho just as there are lots of variations on sweetened bread like toñas or the almondy flavours of things like Tarta de Santiago. Not far from us, in Petrer, we have the shop of one of the most famous cake makers in the whole of Spain; Paco Torreblanca. But, in general, fancy cakes in Spain are often disappointing.

Just bear with me whilst I add something else into the mix. Because I'm old I continue to watch broadcast telly. In the same way that the, Ted Rogers hosted, 3-2-1 show of the late 70s and 80s was based on a Spanish TV show, lots of current Spanish TV programmes are based on international templates: First Dates, Big Brother, The Voice, Come Dine With Me, Strictly Come Dancing, Got Talent, Kitchen Nightmares, Boom and lots more have Spanish versions. Last night the Spanish interpretation of the Great British Bake Off, cleverly titled Bake Off España, aired for the first time. Jesús Vázquez was the host and Dani Álvarez, Betina Montagne and Miquel Guarro were the judges.

I've never seen a full episode of the Great British Bake Off on either the BBC or Channel 4 but I have seen bits of it as Maggie is an avid viewer. Some of those cakes look truly incredible. I did watch the whole of the first of the Bake Off España programmes last night. I didn't think the standard was very high. In fact it looked to me as though lots of the bakers didn't have a firm grasp on the basics. The crema in the milhojas was a runny liquid, a couple of the participants had real problems making their ovens work and there were two kitchen fires. The judges even spat one of the cakes out!

"Well, what would you expect?," asked Maggie, "Spaniards aren't good with cakes."