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Hello, how are you? Very well, I hope. If you are a highly strung quizzer, you will be totally psyched to learn I have posted the answers to the ludicrously hard 1959 BBC Children's Annual quiz for deaf children in the comments thread for that particular post.

There is no prize. Which is probably just as well as there was no clear winner. Hmm. I do feel slightly guilty about this though. If you entered, or left any kind of comment on the quiz post, would you like some biscuits like these? They won a prize themselves once, way back in the heady Indian summer of 2009. You don't have to, obviously. Don't feel obliged or anything. It's no big deal. After all, what am I to you? No more than words on a screen, a stranger. But if you would, send me an email by clicking on the 'Contact me' link somewhere to the left, let me know your address and I will send you some. I promise I won't use this information for ill, or drop round unannounced. I'm really pretty lazy so you can be sure neither of these things will happen.

I will try to learn some lessons from the last time I posted biscuits to people. These lessons may involve bubble wrap. Also – and I'm not proud of this – I still owe the lovely Hel some from a year ago, after a catastrophic email fail. (Hel, if you're reading, let me know if you're at the same address).

I will repeat the lucky dip offer from last year. If you're the first non-commenter to email me, you will also get some biscuits. I don't think that's exactly a lucky dip. That's more first come, first served, but I'm extremely tired and I have to go to Banbury very early in the morning.

Previous applicants need not apply.

You have two weeks to contact me. Then the baking will happen. It won't happen next weekend, as Strictly Come Dancing starts, and I have to go on an owling excursion. It would not be unreasonable for you to expect some kind of report on both those happenings in the coming weeks.

I think that's it then.

Good night.

Cake-related catch-up

In which I bring you, the reader, up to speed with developments in sweet office-based treats.

1. Just as the eskimos reputedly have a whole dictionary of words for snow (OK, it is not that big a dictionary), the Scots have a whole arsenal of words for 'impending diabetic coma'.

One of them is Macaroon.

Not the dinky, pastel confections that you might linger over choosing in Harrods, while your teeny-tiny dog defecates in the bottom of your £3,000 handbag. Not the chewy blonde coconut biscuit, but this:

As far as my palate was able to deduce (and admittedly, my palate is not 'exceptional', unlike Lisa Faulkner's on Celebrity Masterchef, just because she once managed to identify the flavour of sage), this is a hybrid of Kendal mint cake, Bounty and some other ingredients that each provide an additional helping of sweetness.

It reminds me of some farcical Neighbours plot strand, where no one thinks anyone's added any chilli powder to the stew that's bubbling away in the kitchen of the coffee shop, so everyone who passes by adds some, leading to red-faced, water-chugging hilarity, and Harold Bishop vexedly opening and closing his mouth several times and saying, 'BAH!'

But with sugar.

In the Macaroon factory, countless conscientious workers are tipping sacks of sugar into a giant vat, congratulating themselves on rectifying the perceived deficiencies of their colleagues.

2) The first mince pies of the season. Is there a horn that sounds at the start of the hunting season? Maybe there is just a horn at the start of every hunt. I'm kind of behind with my blood sports. Anyway. There should be a sound that rings out to mark the first mince pie of the season. Or, rather, the day when food companies start sending out samples of their festive comestibles to magazine offices, which is what we're really dealing with here. It should take the form of a long, loud melliflous belch, to herald the festive excess that will take place between now and Christmas.

I performed a taste test, comparing and contrasting two mince pies with Viennese stylings, one from a well-known high-street pasty parlour. The other is from Betty's, the Yorkshire Valhalla of cake and bake craft (also available by mail order). Here they are, side by side. Can you guess which is which?

You know how sometimes in women's magazines you might read a feature which, through a rigorous process of independent testing on actual, real women who don't work in the beauty industry and have no interest in appeasing valuable advertisers, reveals that a cheap high-street moisturiser is every bit as nourishing and lost-youth-lassoing as something twenty times as expensive, hand-blended in a Swiss laboratory by butterflies using tiny gossamer balloon whisks?

This is nothing like that.

The high-street mince pie was a bit sawdusty and I immediately regretted wasting a portion of pudding on it.

The Betty's mince pie was four mouthfuls of ambrosia, where ambrosia is made, not just of mincemeat and pastry, but also of apple and marzipan.


Were I Gregg Wallace, I would be feeling somewhat sticky in the trouser area just as a result of eating it.

Luckily I'm not. And sorry for the above.

c) My first whoopie pie.


Whoopie pies are the new cupcakes. Everyone knows that, even Marks & Spencer – and as dearly as I love them, they're hardly the sharpest tools in the box. We had some in the office a few weeks ago. Whoopie pies, not tools. According to Wikipedia my extensive research, Whoopie pies got their name from their origins in the Amish community. Wives would slip one into the lunch boxes of their field-working husbands. Come lunchtime, the famished, sweet-toothed menfolk would open their lunchboxes and be so thrilled at the sight of two small pieces of slightly dried-out sponge stuck together with buttercream that they would shout 'Whoopie!' I wasn't aware that the Amish were especially known for their spontaneous and vocal outbursts of emotion. But then I'm basing this on having seen Witness about 15 years ago and not really being able to remember any of it.

I enjoyed my Whoopie pie - despite an excess of buttercream, which seems to be the patisserie crime de nos jours. It is a bit like finding an Oreo at the back of the cupboard that has been left out of the packet and is also a few weeks past its sell-by date. Which, for me, is in no way a deterrent.

A baking-related inspiring photo essay in which my use of tenses is frankly all over the place

People often say to me: 'Miss Jones, what is it really like at the coalface of top-level competitive baking?'

I shake my head and laugh wryly and tell them that they have already made their first mistake. Never use coal to bake your cakes. I use a fan oven. Here it is:

After I have made this little joke, people seem less inclined to hear my account of the cut and thrust of competition, but as a homage both to the Inspiring Photo Essays of Dr Robert Hudson, and to Them Apples, who is now, officially, the 35th most powerful food blogger in the UK, I am going to share with you the honest inside story of this weekend's baking competition – the sugar-fuelled highs and the oven-scorched heartaches.

Strap in. We may be here some time.

Many rookies assume that entering a competition means you can throw all your baking tricks at the judges, dazzling them with your elaborate sugarcraft and daring flavour chemistry.

Wrong.

You have to respect the rules. Baking is founded on rules, so how else could competitions like this proceed? So this weekend, we were baking to specific recipes which allow not only for like to be judged against like, but also for confusing typos in the ingredients to provoke a sense of genuine culinary jeopardy among competitors.

This year's categories were as follows:

Boiled Fruit Cake (baking drudgery)

Cherry Loaf

Bakewell Tart (pastry fiddliness)

Cheese Scones

There were no biscuits. I am good with biscuits. I am the best at biscuits. Apart from when I am second best at biscuits. These four options were clearly meant to dissuade me from entering, after I shook up the competition and swept to a podium finish, twice over, last year, on a one-way ticket from Nowhere Town to Prize Bakingford. A gauntlet had been thrown down, and while I had no option but to accept it, or whatever it is one does with gauntlets, I was left with few options. It is less that we had chosen the categories of Cherry Loaf and Cheese Scones, and more that they had chosen us.

First assemble your ingredients. This is not essential, but I like to have them all there in front of me at the start, and gradually put them away as I use them. I don't know why. That's what works for me, just like the way Colin Jackson would have to stretch out his legs a certain number of times when settling into his blocks at the start of a hurdles race. Colin Jackson and I often laugh together about our competitive foibles, but sometimes the conversation takes a darker turn when Colin gets angry remembering the ludicrous mannequins show dance Erin Boag made him do in the final of Strictly Come Dancing series 3.

Anyway, the ingredients:

You will notice that mine are mostly from Marks & Spencer. This is not a decision based on quality of produce but on sloth, since there is a branch right near work.

We will begin with the cherry loaf. First, you need to rinse and dry 100g glacé cherries. Here we encounter our first dilemma. What to use? Brand-new undyed glacé cherries from M&S [below, right]? Or glowing-with-nuclear-red-food-colouring, been-in-the-fridge-since-the-Christmas-cake glacé cherries from Sainsbo's [below, left]?

It's true to say that the organisers of this contest are a fairly conventional group. Fashionably uncoloured glacé cherries that are not the colour of an old-fashioned telephone box may be literally a shade too cutting edge. These dilemmas, while testing, are vital to the psychology of competition. In the event that you do not win, you can blame your defeat on the judges narrow-mindedly preferring the option you did not choose. Also, they should have been more clear in their instructions.

Forget about the cherries, even though they will be gnawing at your consciousness like fat shiny rats.

Next, mix together 200g self-raising flour and a pinch of salt. I like to sieve the flour first. I am a fan of sieving. Quite apart from the lightness it brings to your baking, it is tremendously soothing and therapeutic, and lets you think about all manner of thorny philosophical questions, such as will I ever fix the damp and alarmingly cracked patch of ceiling in the hallway right outside my kitchen door? What am I going to do with all those home-made sweet potato falafels in the freezer that I neither want to eat or throw out?

It is true. Sieving opens your mind. I went to one of Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurants on Saturday, where he has a range of merchandise with various Jamie logos on. If I were to open similar premises, I would sell an apron emblazoned with the words 'Live to sieve'.

When you have sieved the flour, then dropped the salt on to it, it makes a nice pattern like this:

...like some kind of futuristic moon-crater snowscape in an eco-sci-fi, box-office-busting movie spectacular. But in your own kitchen! That is the magic of baking RIGHT THERE.

Next, add 100g butter to the flour and salt and rub in until you have a fine breadcrumbs effect going on. Then add 100g caster sugar and the cherries, which you will have chopped up, into a size that is helpfully not specified. I have gone for small-ish but still recognisably cherries.

Next, make a well in the centre of your mixture and add one egg, which you have beaten, and half a teaspoon of vanilla essence. That's essence, you will note, not extract. I don't have old-school synthetic vanilla essence. I have smug middle-class vanilla extract, bought at great expense from the speciality section of my largest local supermarket. Are essence and extract the same? I ask the wonderweb. There is absolutely no definitive answer. Honestly, it is almost as if the internet is awash with ill-earned authority, misplaced opinion and guesswork.

I use the same amount of extract as essence and be damned.

Pour about 5 tablespoons of milk into a measuring jug and add some to the mixture, stirring together the wet and dry ingredients. Add more milk if you need to until the mixture is of a 'dropping consistency'. This means if you hold a spoon of mixture upside down over your worktop, the mixture will drop off – not run off, nor stick to the spoon – on to your worktop and, if you are like me, you will ineffectually wipe it off with a piece of kitchen towel.

You will probably be ready for a cup of tea at this point.

In addition, it may be helpful to listen to some soothing music. I am using a compilation CD given as a favour to all the guests at my friends Nick and Channy's wedding a few weeks ago, in particular this , this and this. Oh and this.

Put the mixture into your mouth into a loaf tin of highly specific dimensions, level the top and put it in the oven (preheated, obviously; 180C/GM4 if you must be exact, and I'm telling you, you must) for about an hour and 15 minutes until it is golden brown, firm to the touch and – now pay close attention to this next bit because I will be bitterly invoking it later – well risen.

At around this time, I start to worry that my cakes and scones will have an unmistakeable taint of Lincolnshire sausages, which was the last thing that was cooked in the general area of my oven.

Baking is full of the unexpected. In this case, your cake may already be golden brown after 30 minutes, forcing you to improvise wildly using whatever resources can be found around you. I am the Bear Grylls of baking, and I wrap the cake in a tin foil blanket to stop it burning.

Still, when it comes out of the oven, it is still on the brown side of golden brown.

Never mind, it's late and there's still work to do. It's all to bake for, etc. Let's press on. Scones next. Turn the oven up to 220C/GM7. This is officially hotter than hell. Hell is only 218C. There are no Gas Marks in hell. Satan prefers an electric oven, as he finds it cooks things much more evenly.

First, mix 225g self-raising flour and 'a pinch of teaspoonful of salt'. What does this mean? I have no idea. This doesn't bode well, scones-wise.

Then rub in 40g butter. What is it with all the 'rubbing in'? First the cake, then the scones. The bakewell tart also calls for rubbing in. This is clearly the key skill of this year's competition. It's probably the case that this competition attracts an older class of entrants, and rubbing in may well be a recommended exercise to guard against arthritis. Alternatively, the common occurrence of arthritis in the elderly may be a direct result of too much competitive baking.

It's worth pointing out that if you don't have at least some flour on your trousers at this point, you're probably doing something wrong.

Next, finely grate 75g cheese (what kind of cheese? Philadelphia? Stinking Bishop? Call me old-fashioned, I plumped for Cheddar), and stir half of it in, along with a level teaspoon of dried mustard. Let us take a moment to salute a true design classic of packaging:

And also to remark on how, in contrast to, say, a bag of Walkers crisps, Colman's really offer their customer value for money when it comes to jamming the product in. Although slightly less so when you've spilled a quarter of it on the floor as the tin bursts open.

Finally, stir in 1/4 pint of milk, or enough to give a fairly soft, light dough. Now roll the dough out to 3/4in thick, and cut out using a 2in plain cutter. Here is mine. I measured it with my Kew Gardens souvenir ruler.

Then I measured it on the back of the ruler to see which common British bird it equated to. The answer is the magpie.

Cut out the scones and put them on a greased baking tray. Locate your pastry brush from the Kitchen Drawer Of Doom. Good luck with that.

Brush the naked scones with milk and sprinkle with the rest of the grated cheese. Bake near the top of the oven (preheated to 220C/GM7) for about 10 minutes. Here they are before...

...and after.

Not bad, yes? I learnt that from Gordon Ramsay. Yes? That's what he says at the end of a sentence, yes? He also calls everyone 'big guy'. The ladies of competitive baking are not really into being called 'big guy', I have found.

Anyway, while your scones are cooking, you might like to tidy up a bit.

It's important here to point out that under no circumstances should you attempt to eat any of the leftover raw savoury dough.

It.

Is.

Rank.

Then you will have to go to bed because it's about half past midnight and you are by now exhausted because you are a busy thirtysomething woman trying to juggle work and homelife, and you have to be up at 6.30 to take your baking to the competition tent because you then have to go to Bath for the day and 6.30 is pretty much the earliest you've been up on a Saturday in YOUR WHOLE LIFE.

Still, taking your baking to the competition tent at a ludicrous hour in the morning is quite exciting as you get to see all the nearby fair rides asleep.

However, when you return to the tent the day after, post-judging, to find out the results of your endeavours, the world stops turning.

Firstly, your scones are not placed. They are next to the first prize-winner. They don't look dissimilar.

Your cake is not placed either.

WHAT THE F*CKING F*CK?

Sorry.

But look at the winning cake (centre). IT LOOKS LIKE A HOUSE BRICK. IT IS NOT 'WELL RISEN'. THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE OUTRAGE.

Again, your cake is next to the one that is placed first. Coincidence? I don't think so. I think the judge had some ocular and spatial disability which resulted in him/her inadvertently placing the first-place sticker on the wrong dish on two separate occasions.

I'm joking of course. You cannot win a prize every time, and there is a lesson to learn from this. A genuine, character-building lesson, particularly relating to grace in defeat.

That lesson is that sometimes the judges just get it wrong. They are stupid. But deep down inside, you can be proud because you know that you were QUITE OBVIOUSLY the best.

Come on, everyone. Buck up. I have. I raised my spirits by buying some peonies from the nearby flower tent.

It got me thinking that I might enter a flower-arranging contest next year. I think you can tell from this picture that I have quite the raw talent.

'Oh! Cakes again? How... thoughtful'

Hello, how have you been?

I've been on a workshop.


Well, I say a workshop. More of an evening class. There's some immense feat of endurance implied in the words evening class, though – all term-long commitment, chilly school corridors and winter colds. This was just a one-night stand, and 'workshop' has a pleasing one-offness about it, as well as a whiff of either sawdust or the sweat of improv, depending on which particular pastoral GCSEs you did.

So Simmo and I learnt to decorate cupcakes. We did actual piping. We rolled our own sugar roses, if you can believe such a thing. We are now highly-skilled sugarcraft ninjas. Or, more accurately, we have learned a small and simple range of devastatingly effective techniques, which is the closely-guarded secret of all ninjas. Most of it is just costume and theatrics. And having the right equipment – ceremonial sword, nunchucks, the right diameter of piping nozzle...

The fact remains, though, that piping buttercream icing is still tricksy. Like milking a fat eel in a plastic bag.

(Milking a cow, meanwhile, is something I enduringly believe I'd be good at. This is because I always have warm hands. Which may or may not be because MY HEART IS STONY COLD. In reality, if I was confronted with a cow needing to be milked, I would probably just start edging away, flinching at a volley of imaginary kicks. Or simply start crying. Other things I think I would be good at include playing the xylophone and plastering. Things I am resolutely sure I would not be good at include the entire range of 'action' sports.)

Anyway, in the picture above, bottom left is my favourite. Top left is a bit shit. But still, these were my first and only attempts. There was no scraping of icing into a nearby pot plant, or surreptitious sliding of botched cupcake into wastebasket. This is raw and uncensored cake craft I am presenting to you. In any case, I always feel a fondness for the runts of the litter. This is not just because of Charlotte's Web, but also because once upon a time, a few years ago, I baked 100 cupcakes, for free, for a charity event. It took me bloody ages, and they really didn't look too shabby, with their near-perfect pink ribbons that I had painstakingly iced on. Flour-streaked and exhausted, I took them along to the event, as they were setting up chairs and tables. As I presented them to one of the organisers, her idiot boyfriend, leaning over her shoulder, pointed at one of my cakes and said, 'That one's a bit small.'

I could honestly have killed him, at that moment. I was a lioness protecting my cakey cubs.

So anyway, my new-found icing smarts spell bad news for my friends, since I am now even more likely to pitch up at social events wielding some freshly baked batch or other, while they offer a weak smile of 'Oh, more cakes? Great', their expressions just like the Leadbeatters being presented with a gift of handmade trousers by the Goods, of which the legs are different colours. This in turn ensures the weather will be abominable, since whenever I am carrying a box of delicately iced cakes anywhere, it is guaranteed to be pouring with rain, the wind catching underneath the box, and threatening to wrench it out of my sodden grip and toss it upturned onto the pavement. I turn up at the event bedraggled, corned-beef fingers frozen solid from clutching the box in front of me, the contents resembling some kind of WI show styled by Jackson Pollock.

Still, since the cupcake market is apparently immune to saturation – it is an urban truth that in London now you are never more than 12 feet from a cupcake concession – this could prove to be a lucrative new venture, just as it has for all the other women who've gone before and now appear in Red magazine talking about it.

Starting my own small business is surely only the-financial-support-of-my-husband-who-happens-to-work-in-banking away.

I honestly can't see any flaw in this plan.

Sweetness follows

I like cooking puddings. I like making cakes.

They follow rules. They celebrate structure. They are science in action. Science that smells nice. Science you can eat afterwards. Just observe this soothing set of instructions and everything will be OK. You will not be expected to make any decisions or express any kind of preference.

I do not like cooking main courses or starters or anything you might call 'proper food'. The stuff you have to eat in order to actually stay alive. I do not enjoy cooking my dinner every evening when I get home from work. I don't find it therapeutic; it does not help me unwind.

This kind of savoury endeavour requires you to exercise an exhausting degree of judgement, with its endless requests for seasoning to taste and vague terms like a 'small bunch' of herbs. Small in comparison to what? A pea? Or Luxembourg? A recipe often calls for a 'handful' of something. I have petite hands for my height. Where does that leave me? Apart from with a lot of gloves that are too big for me, and a sense of precariousness when holding a pint glass in one hand.

Some individuals revel in this more freewheeling side of food preparation. With their flair and their instincts, they love being a utensil-wielding maverick, seizing any soupçon of recipe initiative and smugging: 'You know what this needs?' [Swoops effortlessly into fridge/spice rack/walk-in larder.] 'This!'

I fear and resent these people.

I cooked lunch today for the two Ms Rs. The occasion was orchestrated for two reasons. Firstly, so we could wile away as much time as we liked chatting over two courses without being harassed by well-meaning waiting staff. And also lie down on the carpet and stroke our stomachs between courses, which I understand is frowned upon in some of the more upmarket restaurants.

But secondly, and more importantly, so I could have an excuse to make crème brûlée…

…which came out pretty OK, especially considering I forgot it was in the oven and went and spent half an hour in the bathroom cleaning the mould off my shower curtain. (Yes, that is the kind of thrill ride you can expect chez Jones on a Bank Holiday weekend.) Which meant the créme brûlée was pretty freaking brûlée, even before I had officially brûléed it.

Mostly, on the odd occasions I cook dinner for people, I can summon up the nervous energy to slog away at some savoury offering, for convention's sake. I do understand it's not acceptable to serve three courses when those three courses are a sweet biscuit starter, main course of cake and pudding of pudding.

Yet, should I have a family, I am genuinely concerned about providing nutritious food for a group larger than one on a continued daily basis.

"Mummy, what's for tea?"

"Trifle."

"Mummy, why can't we have cereal for breakfast like everyone else?"

"Because Mummy likes to use her kitchen blowtorch in the mornings."

"Mummy, these sausages taste funny."

"That's because they are made of marzipan."

Of course, most children would be excited by the idea of eating sweet things at every meal. Until, that is, they developed anaemia, rickets, and no longer had the strength to pull themselves up the climbing frame at school.

Who will feed my children? Feed them proper food, I mean.

It is another fear for the files.

Seasonal confectionary news

If you're the sort of person who is not excited by sticking breakfast cereals together with chocolate and putting Mini-Eggs in the middle to make incredibly lifelike yet delicious bird's nests, then good luck with hauling yourself out of bed every day for the rest of your life.

These were crafted by Miss W for lunch yesterday. You can see that, with commendable attention to detail, she has chosen to use Shredded Wheat for twig veritas.

The nests have been 'styled', as we say in magazines, with chicks I found in one of Lewisham's finest pound shops. And in magazine terms, the lady chicks are luring the Red reader, with their cosy-retro Cath Kidston-style headscarves, while the male chicks are more cutting-edge cool-mag. In fact, they look like they're in some avian Hot Chip tribute band. Also, nice bow ties. And we all know how cool they are at the moment…

Now then, it's been a while since I had a proper, delicious, borderline-downmarket Easter Egg – obviously it's been Green & Black's or nothing since I hit my 30s – but are they all like this now?

How long has the stuff that's not the egg been packaged outside the egg? Where is the element of surprise? What happened to the crashing Easter-morning melancholy of bashing open the chocolate egg to discover a disappointingly small amount of chocolatey things indeed, relative to the size of the cavity? Is nothing sacred?

With great power comes great responsibility

About a year before he died, my dad – the king of the fad and the fixation, the passion and the preoccupation – decided he would learn to cook. He was roughly 60, giddy with the liberty of early retirement and hungry for the new – or perhaps just hungry. Prior to this resolution, he was like many men of his generation – my mum could not leave the homestead for a few days without a significant investment in Vesta meals and malt loaf to ensure he would actually eat something while she was away.

And so it began. He bought knives and cookery books. He rolled up his sleeves. And for a few months, he rarely arrived at my house without some homemade offering – a batch of oatcakes, a bowl of exotic fruit salad with anxiously simmered syrup, selotaped shut to prevent a slow, sticky seep all the way from Norfolk to South London. That's how I remember it, at least. Maybe this only happened once or twice, but they're my memories and I'll misshape them how I like.

One of the last presents I bought him – and I don't remember if it was the last Christmas or the last birthday – was a kitchen blowtorch. It was the perfect marriage of man and miniature machine – flash, nifty, yet with a considerable capacity for foolhardy calamity. In my childhood, my dad memorably a) fell backwards through the glass of our living room window while trying to secure a rope on his hand-built boat which lived on our driveway, and b) almost perished under the weight of our car when he was working underneath it and the puny power of a sub-standard jack was dramatically exposed.

After he died – and incredibly, in the run-up to this event, he had managed not to set fire to his own eyebrows – my mum gave the blowtorch to me and I buried it deep in one of my kitchen cupboards, where it has been in the intervening four and a half years.

Until today. Today, with an appropriateness that is as pleasing as it is coincidental, the culinary blowtorch was resurrected. I made a Simnel Cake, according to the gospel of Nigella Lawson, to take to Miss W and Marbury's for Easter lunch. I handrolled the 11 tiny marzipan balls that go on top – as you will know, they traditionally represent the apostles (soz, Judas – you're barred). Mine are of slightly uneven size and randomly spaced which, of course, is of considerable, if indeterminate, religious significance.

'Now for the bit I love,' says Nigella, introducing the notion of artfully scorching the marzipan topping, 'but you can ignore altogether.'

What are you saying, Lawson? That I am not up to a bit of live-action charring? Who do you think you're dealing with? I have won over £3.75 in high-level baking competitions. Step back, cow eyes*, while I open the throttle and hit the ignition.

(You may guess from this that I am not a driver.)

Just so you know, blowtorching is AMAZING. I have rarely felt more alive. I may have found my inner superhero. She has a blowtorch coming out of the end of each limb and she is called The Caramelizer.

All back to my place for crème brûlée?

*I don't mean this. I love Nigella. I'm just showing off.

Wait, oh yes, wait a minute, Mr Postman

If you are a biscuit claimer/claimant (you can choose your own suffix, I'm fairly relaxed about this), then today I have been working HARD for YOU.

Warning: red-hot naked biscuit action follows

You lot will catch your death. Put something on…

That's better. Now, if you, readers, are anticipating biscuits by post, take a good look at this:

Not actual size. By sending me your postal address you have agreed to enter into a ribbon lottery whereby ribbon despatched may differ from that pictured.

The next time you see something like it, it will be IN YOUR HOME, emerging from a Jiffy bag like a lumpy, edible butterfly from a padded chrysalis. And also the contents will have disintegrated into a fine brown powder which I would suggest you sprinkle on to some vanilla ice cream or something. You may notice that I have upgraded the container from Chinese carry-out foil carton to the kind of thing you might get a portion of takeaway lasagne from Carluccios in, if you are a profligate gourmand about town. This is because some biscuits are embarking on a journey to NEW ZEALAND, which is about as far away from London SE22 as it's possible to get. And also because I care. I really do.

The borderline anti-climax of the interactive excitement, in which interactivity eats itself, and some people get to eat prize-winning biscuits

You may recall that several weeks ago, on these very screens, I set a thrilling mystery object competition.

The time has now come for prizes and further interactivity, and also for confession and atonement.

The truth is that the identity of the object remains a mystery. I have let you all down but, in my defence, I have been let down too on many sides, and those sides include The Internet Generally, with particular reference to Google Images, as well as Dulwich's upmarket kitchen utensils shop. I have asked, via email, an actual proper food journalist/chef who has been on television and everything, and who was recently full of praise for my baking skills, of which more to follow. She has not replied, which shows what a big deal I am.

In summery, the proper, actual serious competition remains unresolved. The not literally glittering organic marmalade that looks like it's been tampered with but actually hasn't will not be awarded to the one true winner just yet. This is just The Way It Is. Suck it up. It is hard to suck marmalade, but that is not what I meant. However, it is time to proffer the previously secret and never-before-mentioned Other Prizes. It is like this is the boxing tournament at the Olympics, and I'm giving out the bronze medal before the gold medal fight has taken place, only there has been no bronze-medal deciding bout, I'm just giving lots of people bronze medals because I think it might be, like, nice and stuff.

Yes, it is exactly like that.

But what are the bronze medals? Where is the further interactivity? Read on, read on.

I received several suggestions relating to the use of the object which were ingenious and brilliant, while not grounded entirely in reality, and generally Incorrect. These originators can now claim a batch of handmade chocolate and ginger biscuits which I, Miss Jones, small-fry award-winning baker of south London (NB, the biscuits are not fried), have freshly made for you, the bronze medallists. The biscuits are the bronze medals. They are round, like medals, and a bit bronze-coloured. I don't just throw these analogies together. These are the biscuits that won the prize that comprised the mystery object that initiated the competition that made the whole world sing.

Because Poundland is full of interesting things, the biscuits will be packaged in foil takeaway cartons like this:

Stunt biscuits were used in the recreation of this photo and do not resemble the actual prize.

They will not be packaged like this:

This is something that my phone camera/camera phone did that I did not ask it to, because I wasn't really concentrating, on account of the fact I was at the same time watching Siobhan who is in my choir on The F Word talking about the venison she was eating.

So, if you are the commenter named Salvador, Hel, Simmo, Frances or Holly and if you would care to, please send me an email by clicking on the Contact Me link to the left, and nominate a postal address where your biscuits can be sent. I will also send a batch to the first random reader who responds this way. Then, when you receive them, it would be totally awesome if, in return, you email me a picture of the state they arrived in, as well as the date. Thus the interactive element thrusts tirelessly forward in a ground-breaking investigation of the state of the Royal Mail, the robustness of home-made biscuits, and the suitability of takeaway-style foil cartons for transporting them. We are breaking boundaries, you and I, and the Royal Mail are breaking my biscuits, almost certainly. I will wait a couple of weeks before baking/posting because, unbelievably, not everyone is feverishly checking this blog on a daily basis.

Finally, in further baking news, here is a picture of an excellent eccles cake made by Miss W which I ate on Saturday, even though it had a plaintive little face that was looking right at me:

Exciting/doomed interactive element

At the weekend, I won this:

What is it? I don't know. Let's find out together, because the internet is all about sharing.

I am fairly confident when I say it is used in the cooking/baking arts. The mystery object has two not-quite-pointed ends, with a ridged middle section. It could be a rolling pin, and maybe it is, only you would end up with a rubbish criss-crossed pattern all over your pastry, which I quite often do, but not intentionally. Here is a picture that gives an indication of its size, in comparison with the 30cm Mr Men ruler I have had since I was about 6, and a regular household teaspoon, that I have had since I was about 28, probably.

I am hereby setting a competition in which enormous amounts of prestige and an actual genuine prize will be awarded to the best person/the first person/a person/someone/anyone/seriously, anyone at all (roll up, roll up to watch me crash and burn!) who either a) guesses the correct identity of the object, or b) provides the most entertaining explanation, in the case of me never finding out the answer to a) myself.

'What is the prize?' I am deluded enough to think I might hear maybe one of you briefly wondering, before you go and read some other, more interesting blog. I will tell you. The prize is a delicious jar of marmalade made by highly desirable, adored-by-upmarket-lifestyle-magazines company Daylesford Organic. I also won this at the weekend, yet am prepared to give it to you. This is not the benevolent gesture it may appear. My congenital hostility towards marmalade has been well reported on these screens.

Here is a picture that allows you to judge the size of the jar of marmalade alongside another jar of preserve, in this case the hyberbolically named St Dalfour Rhapsodie de Fruit raspberry.


Basically, I just like the look of these two jars next to each other. Daylesford is the Eddie Large to Dalfour's Syd Little, the Gary Barlow to its Jason Orange, the much fatter Paul Simon to its Art Garfunkel, the Ted Bovis to its Spike Dixon (Hi-de-Hi seems to have become my go-to sitcom for lame comparisons). The Daylesford marmalade also comes in a rustic, I-made-it-myself-in-my-Cotswolds-farmhouse-while-wearing-a-Boden-dress, clip-top jar which, while being stylish, does also look a little like someone has opened it already and stuck their hand in, WHICH THEY HAVEN'T. Well, not me anyway.

So. Hit me with your best shot. Somebody please.

Terms and conditions: 1) I am basically in charge and will give the prize to whoever I like. 2) This does not affect your statutory rights. 3) I don't really know what your statutory rights are, but I don't see how they could be affected, right? 4) No purchase necessary. 5) There is no cash alternative. 6) This competition is open until I finally become resigned to the embarrassingly slim number of entrants and put us all out of our misery.

Miss Jones FTW

I know, I'm sorry. I've had a lot on. But look:

I am no longer a prematurely middle-aged, slightly apologetic runner-up in life. I am a winner - OFFICIAL. The Lambeth Horticultural Society says so.

My busy metropolitan lifestyle meant I only had time to enter one category in the society's summer show. Freestyle flapjacks.

No recipe, no rules - this was Extreme Baking.

I was not confident of the outcome. Everyone else's flapjacks were neater, squarer, fairer of colour. It would not be verbal overkill to say that mine looked slightly rustic in comparison. Also, in terms of ingredients, I had thrown in the kitchen sink, if your kitchen sink is made of chopped dried apricots, sunflower seeds and pine nuts. Mine is not, but the world is a big place and everyone is different. I wondered if a pine nut might just prove too edgy for the straits of serious competition. Dejected, I phoned Mrs Jones who, in her capacity as retired art history tutor, delivered a rallying speech on the importance to society of avant garde artists, no matter how cruelly they may be pilloried by their peers.

I felt much better. And then I saw the results, and felt much, much better. This was almost as good as getting to the finals of Radio Norfolk's Sixth Form Challenge.

I am attributing my victory to my lucky pink paper plates. It is entirely possible that I have unwittingly used some kind of colour therapy to influence the judges. Look at all the entrants:

Doesn't mine just remind you of a summer meadow bright with flowers? In a room that is also home to lots of carefully arranged floral displays battling for your consideration, I'm counting this as no small achievement.

Simultaneously, while the judges are tasting my work, the pink card beneath is making them feel warm and nurtured, as though they're back in the womb.

Next time, I'll be using a sound chip like they do in birthday cards, so the plate plays soothing whale song when someone from authority approaches. I've got my eye on a shiny silver trophy.

I fought the Lambeth Horticultural Society, and the Lambeth Horticultural Society won, but I came second

Previously on Why Miss Jones, I told you how I was grievously slighted by someone in authority at the Lambeth Horticultural Society, during the Lambeth Country Show. You may recall that I swore vengeance.

Well, this weekend [steely, ominous voice] it was time.

The battlefield was the Domestic Classes of the 2009 Lambeth Country Show Flower Show (too many shows, but I cannot explain it any other way) - in particular, the baking categories. I did not, as I had proposed, learn skills from the world’s best baking ninjas. I did not travel to Vienna and Kyoto. Instead, I searched deep, deep within myself – past the literature of the American renaissance, past my A-level French vocabulary and past all the lyrics to Duran Duran's Rio album – and drew on all I had learnt at the formica worktop of Mrs Jones. I also trusted in an email I received from a lovely lady called Valerie, a benign member of Lambeth Horticultural Society, who answered my plea about how to enter and also wished me good luck.

I put my entry form in the post, thereby sounding a warning. I would bring bloody warmongering to Class 76 Cranberry and Ginger Blondies. I would bring righteous fury to Class 77 Marmalade Cake. I would bring noble fire to Class 79 Chocolate Cherry Cookies. I would bring the ingredients to my kitchen on Friday night and spend hours baking, then end up scraping the lot into the bin at 1am in a tantrum of curdled hopes and burnt dreams, hot flour-streaked tears pouring down my cheeks.

Or so I thought. Instead, the gods of baking smiled on me on Friday night. The blondies and the cookies worked like a charm, despite the obstacles put in my path by LHS in the form of numerous errors in the recipes. For example:

150g (5oz) white chocolate, broken into pieces

50g (5oz) soft butter

How much bloody butter? 50g? Or 5oz? Because they are really, really different amounts. Hear me when I say this, elderly recipe writers with your trembly-fingered typos, you will not destroy me. I AM STRONGER THAN YOU.

Unfortunately I was not quite strong enough to make a decent marmalade cake. I am blaming this on an extremely suspect jar of marmalade. My cake mix tasted disgusting, and alarm bells rang immediately, because everyone knows that cake mix tastes better than almost anything in the world. I then tasted the half-empty jar of marmalade. It too was abhorrent. However, I was not a sound judge, since marmalade always tastes like the foulest poison to me. I consider it literally the preserve of the devil.

I texted Miss W for advice. She had expressed enthusiasm for the marmalade cake and marmalade generally – yet, charitably, I was still allowing her to be my friend. I asked her if marmalade was meant to taste quite so repulsive. She told me probably not, and administered her usual pragmatic comfort, reminding me gently that I was entering the competition in an ironic and post-modern context. Let me tell you, I was not feeling ironic, post-modern anguish. It was the real thing.

So the marmalade, a brand new jar, was rotten. But what could I do? The shops were shut. I could only shove the cake in the oven, put the best of Teenage Fanclub on the kitchen stereo to calm me down, and hope for the best.

The sun rose over Brockwell Park on Saturday morning, and I made my way to the Flower Show tent with my freshly baked weapons. I walked up to the reception desk, told them my name and in return I was given this:

Oh yes, readers, I am kind of a big deal. These change hands for hundreds of pounds in certain tea shops and garden centres with wheelchair access.

The atmosphere in the tent was – heh – intense. People were nervously primping bonsai trees and smoothing out crocheted blankets. An elderly man was wiping stray smears of homemade jam from around the rim of a jar with the concentration and precision of a watchmaker.

I started to lay out my entries on their special, pink paper plates. Then a lady tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I would like to use some of her clingfilm. I felt a warm glow spread through me, from my sweating feet to the tips of my shaking fingers. It was a glow of camaraderie, but also of smugness because I may be a rookie, but I had remembered to bring my own clingfilm. So I said no thank you, and told her she was very kind. And to make conversation, and try to prolong the moment of respectful bonhomie at the competition coalface, I said, ‘Oof! It’s really hot in here, isn’t it!’

'Oh,' she said ominously, striking a deadly blow at my ingenous enthusiasm, ‘this isn’t hot. This is nothing compared to some shows.’ She also told me that she had won the handicrafts cup a few years before. That put me in my place.

Once I had set out my plates, and spent several minutes moving them a few centimetres one way, then several centimetres back again, I wandered around the tent (which was still closed to non-exhibiting civilians) looking at all the other displays, without the crush of the general public. It was a special time and I thought this is what it would be like if you were allowed into The Louvre or The Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York at dawn, just the greatest treasures of the world, and you. And about two dozen really competitive pensioners.

But then, a man shouted, ‘Stop exhibiting!’ and it was exactly like Masterchef, and all the arranging and fussing was over, and we had to leave the tent so that judging could begin.

A couple of hours later, I had been joined at the Lambeth Country Show by Miss W and Marbury, and with them by my side I returned to the tent to Face Destiny.

Firstly, the marmalade cake was not placed. I was not surprised, given the rogue batch of marmalade. Thanks, Forest Hill branch of a popular supermarket chain, for RUINING MY LIFE.

But then there was this:

And this:

Two second places. TWO SECOND PLACES. I felt elated. I felt alive. I suddenly felt really, really tired.

Yes, you are right. I didn't totally win. But I rocked the Lambeth Horticultural Society to its foundations. I think. No one could say I was not a baking force to be reckoned with. All of south-east London will know and fear me.

So, to the runner-up, the spoils. And here they are:

Three pounds. Three whole pounds. Two second-place prizes of one pound fifty. It’s unfortunate that I then spent eleven pounds on my way home in Herne Hill’s excellent branch of Oxfam, but I don't need to tell you that here, money is unimportant. Like all the great contests – Mastermind, Fifteen To One – prize money is irrelevent. It is about prestige. It is about respect. It is about glory. And now, I am only hungry for more.

Next time on Why Miss Jones: more from the Lambeth Country Show, in particular, vegetable sculpture and owl-stretching time.