Back here looking after my Ma in East Yorkshire, I’m surrounded by her cookery book collection, much of which has followed her around since the 1950s. Lots of dessert recipes that look like this – acres of amazing-looking frosting in particular. We’ve lost the art to frost with wild abandon. It’s all got to look like something nowadays.

No, the older cookery books have it right.

(Although, my mum’s cookery books all seem to contain recipes that involve embedding prawns in aspic jelly, so you can see them staring out at you from their little transparent wobbling tombs. Very disturbing. On this topic, I am staunchly modern. Kthx).