Tradition ...

I iced my Christmas cake today. As it was a dark , wet afternoon (again) I decided this was to be today's blip - though there were some wonderful fleetingly pink clouds at dusk. But there's such a story here ...

The icing sugar isn't white. Since I discovered unrefined sugar, my cake has been a pale gold colour. Think city snow, in the days of my childhood, when it lay on the streets unmelting until it had turned a strangely brown colour and looked like ... unrefined sugar. I think it tastes better. The eggs are free range and have, apparently, foraged in woodland. The shells were amazingly hard. The glycerine - half a teaspoonful to keep the icing from going brick hard - is an antique. The bottle is the one I bought for the first time I made my own cake. Read on for that bit, but not till I tell you that I once misread my own writing and used half a tablespoonful in the icing mix. It was flumpy in the extreme. The recipe is handwritten in red biro inside a cookery book I inherited from George Douglas, onetime Dean of Argyll and The Isles, who died aged 84 the year I made my first cake. Read on again ...

The recipe is headed "Christmas 1973". So this is my 40th anniversary of cake-making, and I recall clearly the circumstances of making that first cake. I was over 7 months pregnant with my first child, and that morning I had slipped on the ice in Clarence Drive, Glasgow, and sat down hard. Quite apart from my baby-related angst, my coccyx was so sore that I couldn't sit down - so I made a cake instead, to take my mind off it.

To finish the picture, the hand-held electric beater whose beaters are visible over the bowl (from beating the egg whites) is a Kenwood Mini and dates, like the glycerine, from that first cake.

And that, O best beloved, is how traditions are made ...