The prospect of baking a cake tonight for the first in-person team meeting for a while tomorrow & being able to make it lactose-free for one particular colleague who often misses out.

I wasn't very bold, was I? Maybe a good thing. You'd all want to come to our team meeting for a piece of Devonshire Honey Cake (see the BBC's Good Food website recipe)

My mother, who was quite a good baker, once decided to make honey cake. It wasn't good at all, and nobody wanted to eat it, so we left it out for the birds. After about a month we came to the conclusion that neither the birds nor any other beast would ever touch the stuff, so we had to throw it out.

I also have a honey cake story. My mother, also quite a good baker, once decided to make honey cake. The whole house smelled of honey while it was baking, yet the result was an ordinary sponge cake that hardly tasted of honey at all. Maybe it’s like brewing coffee, where the optimal temperature for extracting the flavour will send the flavour flying off into the air given any chance. Is there a baking equivalent to the espresso machine, that bakes the cake in a sealed oven?