I joked on twitter last week that my reselection meeting was pending, and I didn’t know whether to make a cake or write a speech in preparation.

I got there on Saturday and found I was unopposed, so in the final count, neither effort was needed. Barring some sort of problem I will be one of the Lib Dem candidates fighting to retain our seats at the election in May next year.

But I did have in my diary a note to make a cake on Friday evening, so I knew I had promised to do so.

I have been waiting for an excuse to make this Dan Lepard recipe from the Guardian. I have his weekly recipe as an RSS feed, and about half of them look interesting enough to make.

This link was for a coffee and ginger flavoured cake with a lemon, cream cheese icing.

And me being me, I didn’t make it up as per the recipe spec.

I don’t have a 22cm tin (I never measure baking tins anyway, which, along with knackered scales, accounts for my hit and miss cakemaking), so I used a 2lb loaf tin. Putting THAT MUCH butter AND cream cheese in the icing seemed a huge amount of unnecessary fat, so I missed out the butter. I didn’t have any vegetable oil, so I used some hazelnut oil that is now, hem hem, three years out of date. The shop I went to for last minute ingredients didn’t have shelled pistachio nuts, so I just got chopped mixed.

But the cake I got out of it was… interesting. Don’t know if it was the lack of butter, but the frosting didn’t stay put and trickled down the sides in a sticky mucky way. The mix was a good fit for the loaf tin – it felt to me like it would have been not enough for a 22cm tin. But the flavour – I thought it didn’t feel terribly coffee-y or ginger-y. It was interesting, but a sort of muddy flavour. Not sure if I should make it again, but if I did, I think I would add more coffee and more ginger.

When I got to the meeting, it transpired the reason I was making a cake was for a “guess the weight of the cake” competition. We meet in a Methodist church hall, and the Methodists do not allow raffles or any game of chance, or alcohol as prizes on their premises. As we try and recoup the (very reasonable) room hire charges from those present, we have a game of skill instead.

I made things happen so that the prize from the guess the weight of the cake was not the cake itself, but half the kitty. I had not remembered to weight the cake before leaving home so we had to dispatch a kind member to the nearest Lib Dem home to weigh it, and it clocked in at 1lb 15 oz. Those members who’d spotted it was 2lb loaf-tin size were ultimately confounded by it being ever so slightly lighter than bread!

After the competition, we all ate a bit of it, and it was generally pronounced good. I even got a few pieces to take back home.