Books best bakes: cakes in fiction from Dickens to George RR Martin

Baking in fiction has been used to symbolise everything from death to sex to female identity. As Great British Bake Off ends, we look at the tastiest cakes in literature

Miss Havishams bride cake (1860)

She has left the wedding feast untouched since she was jilted, so in Great Expectations Pip finds the cake has become a shapeless, cobwebbed mess, like a black fungus with speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies using it as a home. The way Dickens dwells on the grotesque details of decay implies that it depicts more than just Havisham herself, conceivably encompassing a Victorian Britain paralysed and made rotten by its sexual taboos.

Continue reading...