Helen Peacocke talks to Geraldene Holt about West Country Cakes

Food writer Geraldene Holt adds something extra to the mixing bowl when making cakes. It’s love, an ingredient which seems to get overlooked by many of the Big Bake Off competitors who are desperately fighting the clock when cooking up their amazing creations for television. They have no time for sentimentality.

Stirring gently, Geraldene sprinkles love into the bowl with great care so that it gently infuses its magic on to the rest of the ingredients. Love doesn’t have a taste as such, but those eating Geraldene’s cakes know it’s there. It’s the ingredient that binds everything together. Bite into a slice of one of her cakes and you soon know that it’s special and has been prepared lovingly.

I first met Geraldene more than 30 years ago at the first of the Oxford food symposiums organised by Alan Davidson, who put together OUP’s Oxford Companion to Food. She had just brought out her first book, The Cake Stall, and was as excited as I was at being a member of a symposium which had attracted eminent food writers from all over the world. That first book, which celebrated all the cakes she cooked for her stall in Tiverton’s Pannier Market, proved so successful she expanded it in 2011 and renamed it Geraldene Holt’s Cakes.

Having had a large number of cookery books published over the years, including Geraldene Holt’s Complete Book of Herbs, she has become a highly respected food writer. Geraldene is also founder of the Jane Grigson Trust, a Patron of Oxford Gastronomica and Visiting Fellow in food studies at Oxford Brooks University, added to which her books have been translated into 11 languages.

Geraldene grew up in the West Country, for which she has a strong affinity, though she and her husband now spend the summer in the Ardeche region of France. Once autumn arrives, however, they return to their home in Oxford until spring, which is why I was able to meet her for lunch and discuss her latest book, Geraldene Holt’s West Country Cakes & Assorted Fancies (Mabecron Books, £15.99), which offers a delightful insight into the unique flavours of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. We met at The Rickety Press, Cranham Street, an atmospheric place to talk as its rooms are adorned with piles of books, the staff are friendly and the food simply delicious.

Geraldene’s book is a personal collection of recipes drawing on the flavours and ingredients of the West Country. She describes it as a way of honouring her origins and past, which means it includes a variety of traditional delights: Cornish Splits and Saffron cake, Devonshire Revel buns and Cider cake, Dorset Matrimony cake and Custard tarts along with Sedgemoor Easter cake and, of course, Bath buns from Somerset which were once buttered and served as standard fare in the nation’s railway refreshment rooms. She has also added Hot Strawberry tarts, Elderflower and Almond Meringue cake, Apricot Trifle cake and an Ice Cream Marble cake which is delicious if made from fruit-based ice creams. It is a delightful collection and includes the many cakes that Geraldene has cooked throughout her life, both for her family and for the cake stall she shared with her mother.

Many of her cakes were originally baked to recipes found in old Women’s Institute cookery books which she bought for as little as five pence each from a book seller who also traded at Tiverton market. The changes she has made to these vintage recipes include cutting out that teaspoon of salt, which she never adds to her cakes now.

She considers the act of making a cake with quality ingredients both therapeutic and relaxing. Whilst you can buy Christmas cakes, few will ever measure up to the cake you have made, using real butter, free-range eggs, and all the good things that make it special, including that sprinkling of love. As Geraldene has often remarked, few of us bake a cake just for ourselves; she says it’s a generous act to spend time in the kitchen producing a cake that will bring pleasure to others.