 An imminent birthday means I need a cake for the obligatory celebration. Do I A. buy or B. bake a cake? For me, though, there is no choice. The systems of food marketing and manufacturing play upon the use of obligatory festivals in order to sell overpriced, over-engineered, sickly sweet cakes that give you a sugar rush. While the psychoactive alkaloids of the cocoa, the caffeine and fear bromine mess with your brain chemistry and metabolism to give you a mildly blissed-out feeling. Any food that messes with brain chemistry always has an exploitative, value-added cospenity, which, when it comes to cake, are refused to pay. This post started with a rant about vegan chocolate cake. Someone posted a photo of a wondrous new acquisition. A vegan cake in a box with a prominent reduced was £6. Now £2.52 sticker on the front. I was not impressed. Vegan cake is so easy to make. I am amazed at anyone who would think any mass-market cake was a bargain at all. Cake is a beautiful thing. And thus it pains me that something which can be so easily and inexpensively made is mangled through mass-marketing and cult celebrity TV machination into something that detracts from its essential purpose as a simple gift to share. My response? Ignore the overhyped celebration of affluent excess and cut straight to the essential, simple, shared meal of brain-ultrant ingredients utilising some simple, punk, do-it-yourself practical action. As the table of ingredients shows, the most expensive part for chocolate cake is the cocoa, especially if you pay a fair price to that globally traded drug by using fair trade produce. Very simply, the more cocoa, the more intense the flavour hit, and buying your drug's fair trade gives a better, less bitter buzz. The economics of mass-market cakes requires that they minimise the cost. To do this, various additives are used, as well as a heap of sugar, that create the sticky, oily texture of mass-market cakes. In part, that's why I hate commercial cakes. They have an overpowering flavour of cheap processed sugar, rather than the main flavouring ingredient they are advertised as containing, be that cocoa or nuts or fruit. Most of these modern ingredients are not there to improve the cake, but to improve the shelf life of the cake. For example, humectants that trap moisture to stop the cake drying out. Personally, I think if a cake lasts long enough to dry out before being eaten, it wasn't tasty enough, or you need to be sharing it with more people. Any type of everyday cake can be easily and simply made without all those additional ingredients, and can be made for a fraction of the cost of the mass-market offerings. Of course, the immediate conclusion might be that if your cake is cheaper, you can have more of it. Instead, I prefer to increase the quality of the ingredients to increase the taste experience, which in this case means adding lots of cocoa. First issue, how much cake mix to make? Start with a cake tin. It's a simple ratio. Fill the cake tin half full with flour, then use about one-third the volume of oil as the weight of flour, and a quarter to a fifth of the weight of sugar as the flour. The baked cake will usually rise to twice the height of the raw cake mix. To estimate how much flour to use, just half fill the tin, then add the oil and sugar in the right proportions, unless you're using lots of nuts or mixed fruit, in which case deduct a little. This is just a plain, extremely chocolatey cake. You could halve the amount of cocoa and it would still taste of chocolate, but not as intensely. Likewise, you could double the amount of sugar if you wanted the standard, mass-market, overpowering, sweet flavour. You can play with the ingredients list. Add in ingredients as you like. For example, without the cocoa, and with a little nutmeg and mixed fruit instead, you would have a fruit cake. The basic mix of flour, oil, sugar and raising agents is the basis of all cakes. Everything else is just for flavour. Now mix everything together. Begin with the flour. I use white-self-raising flour for my more exotic cakes because you get a more spongy result. Whole meal works well, but doesn't quite rise as much during baking. I add extra raising agents to the flour, sodium bicarbon cream with tartar. The proteins inside the eggs usually used to make non-vegan cakes helps the cakes rise. Adding extra raising agent makes up for that, and it's essentially the difference between vegan and non-vegan cakes. Next, I add the cocoa powder and mix really thoroughly, making sure there are no small lumps of dry ingredients. Now I add the oil. If you want a more sticky, oily cake, use a little extra. First, mix the oil into the flour with your fingers, and when it has disappeared, start to blend everything between your palms. This might take a while. What's required is an even, uniform, crumb-like mass. To add stickiness and richness to the cake, I add molasses, which is essentially the natural equivalent of the glucose syrups used in mass market cakes. Dissolve 3 tablespoons of molasses in about 150 millilitres of warm water. Add the sugar to the mix. Then pour over the molasses and water. Then with a spoon, mix everything briskly until you get a smooth, but not too liquid goo. The mix needs to be wet enough to rise easily. The test is to mix thoroughly, and then lift the spoon. If you lift the spoon, and a sticky string falls off, and then another, it's just right. In the single string, it's too wet, and you should add a little more flour. If you lift the spoon and it doesn't flow at all, add a little more water, and mix thoroughly again. At this stage, if you wanted to drop in a chopped up bar of chocolate, or nuts, or mixed fruit, or other herbal flavourings, you should add them at this point, and then thoroughly stir them into the mix. Most importantly, the moment you add water, the raising agents are activated. Mix the cake as quickly as possible, and then pour into the cake tin, and get it in the oven. You should put the oven on to preheat before you start mixing the cake. Gas mark two and a half, 155 Celsius, 310 Fahrenheit. When the mix is the right thickness, pour it into the cake tin, and then gently stir inside the tin until it's well mixed. This seems to make the cake rise better than just pouring the mix into the tin, and helps to reduce the cake splitting in the middle as it rises. Put the cake tin in the middle of the oven, for at least an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how deep your cake tin is. A deeper cake requires a longer baking time. When it's ready, you should be able to press a thin knife into the centre, leave for five seconds, and then remove without seeing any wet streaks on the blade. When baked, turn it out into a cooling tray. It needs to stand for a few hours to allow it to cool fully, before eating or decorating. You could eat as is. You could melt a bar of chocolate, and spread that over the cake. For this event, I'm mixing four parts fondant icing to one part cocoa powder to make a really chocolatey sweet glaze. Put the cake on a plate, dump a little on top, and spread it over. I use a straight back edge of an ordinary table knife for this. To do the side of the cake, I dump a dollop on the top, then push it over the edge, and swirl it round the side. When finished, let it stand for a few hours until it is set. I'm dusting the whole top of the cake with icing sugar, then I'll scratch through with a point of a knife to write the message. How you decorate, or not, is completely up to you. It's part of the creative process, and can improve the flavour of your cake by adding, quite literally, a little eye candy. Why was I annoyed by that social media post about the bargain chocolate cake? A 454 gram cake, costing £2.52, works out at £5.50 per kilo. Though normally they sell for around £13 a kilo. I made this chocolate cake for £3.50 a kilo, and it's nutritionally superior. Making a cake isn't very hard. It was one of the first things I was taught to make as a child. Once you have the feel for how much flour and oil to use, how to blend them, and add just the right amount of water to make it rise, everything after that becomes free improvisation, adding whatever ingredients you wish to get the result you desire, or just making a simple cake with whatever ingredients you have to have available. Cake is as gift to share. It's something to stimulate the taste senses, put a little sugar rush in your blood, and cheer the spirit. Too much cake ceases to be a treat, and is made in moderation. But learning to make a good tasty spongy cake can make an event of any occasion. We've had the need to participate in the exploitative mass market for sweet goods that are frost upon society through the medium retail systems today.