Happy Birthday Delia!

Happy Birthday to Delia! It's 18th June 2015, and the official start date of our year-long challenge. Strangely it is also Sir Paul McCartney's birthday today (born exactly a year apart!), but I will leave it to someone else to set themselves a crazy challenge related to him.

Before we kick off, I thought a bit of history was in order. Delia Smith's Book of Cakes was first published in 1977, when it looked like this:

It's a familiar sight to me, as my mum owns a copy which has been so well-used over the years it barely passes as a book - more a pile of slightly browned pages are falling out of a copy of this small paperback (compared with modern cookbooks) which has been used to make cakes in the Chitty house since the 1970s.

Since its first publication, the book has never been out of print. That's quite a testament to those cake recipes. In 1988, a shiny new version appeared - this is the one my mum bought for me and where I still go back to for advice on timings for fruit cakes of all shapes and sizes! By the 80s, Delia's Book of Cakes looked like this:

This one has a few colour photos, and although hugely informative and packed with great recipes, it looks to a modern eye, a tad dated. A lot of the recipes have not changed one bit from their first publication in 1977 right through to the glossy colourful, fully modernised version which came out just two years ago, and looks in keeping with the hundreds of other well presented cookbooks out there. This is the copy we're challenging ourselves to cook though.

Finally, before the recipes begin (we will get to taste not one but two of them at tomorrow's team meeting, which I await with anticipation!) I should answer the question Julie asked when I suggested the idea: "Why Delia?". She is a hero of mine (some friends may recall a framed photo of her in my kitchen, before it was removed due to an overload of ingredient splattering), I grew up with her demonstrating recipes on TV (I don't remember a December without Delia's Christmas being shown) - and her recipes have been successful for millions of home bakers from before I was born, right up to the present day. It's an iconic work, and one worth celebrating. We hope to do it justice!