Radio presenter and journalist - Leicester based

I've got my game face on. I'm playing a long game here. I've got to plan, to prep, to buy cake stuff for a competition. I give good cake. I am a dab hand with a piping bag. For goodness sake I got through to the auditions of the Great British Bake Off but it seems easy when compared to the down and dirty face off at the St Anne's Fundraising Cake Sale and Bake Off, Saturday 23 April, 10.30am -1pm, for the Tin Annie appeal.

It's all very well baking for the Silver Fox, Mrs Berry and competing against strangers, I know personally the people I'm up against in this one and they are good. Very good.

Bake off competitions, the small ones not run by the baking nazis at the WI, tend to be all about looks, as is so much in this world. So long as you haven't subbed salt for sugar and used a recipe you are familiar with,  you can pretty much guarantee the cake will taste OK. All that palaver about getting the flavour balance right is a sneaky way of saying you don't like their cake without actually having to say 'I don't like your cake' to someone's face.  Judges in little cake competitions tend to be respected members of the community, people who would probably rather cut off their own little toe rather than judge between cakes baked by people they know. They are judges who probably couldn't tell you if your passion fruit was over powering or the sugar in your Italian meringue icing hadn't caramelised  if their lives depended on it. So they use the only sense they can trust, the only yardstick they can reliably agree on, their eyes and the look of the beast.

Looks are everything in cake contests. Like Donald Trump at a rally it's all glitter and frosting with some crowd pleasing cake-bites but little actual substance. You can win them with a fairly average sponge but if it looks like the Christmas fairy has barfed glitter onto your icing you are probably on for a winner. Make it big, use icing in acid bright psychedelic colours, turn it into a construction project with rotating bits, pillars and an impressive castellated roof line and victory can be yours.

Insight is important. Does the vicar like Star Wars? Is there a secret stash of My Little Ponies in the living room of the woman from the Mother's Union? Does one or any of them hate fondant icing?  So as well as getting my stuff together, my spies will be out watching to see who likes marzipan and who leaves the icing from the birthday cake on the side of their plate. Knowledge is power and victory will be mine!

Change happens. It happens all the time. It doesn’t mean I have to like it. Things are changing in my world. St Annes Church Hall is being dismantled, taken to pieces, redesigned. I have no idea what it’s going to look like but I’ve contributed to it’s rebirth in cash and sweat and tears. It will be brilliant when it’s finished. Well at the very least it won’t fall down with age and it’s not going to leak. While this happens we obviously can’t use it for all the things we normally do there, like birthday parties, Pram Club on a Thursday (off until September) and Zumba. We will find somewhere to have the parties in the meantime and  Pram Club is taking a hiatus but fitness will always find a way. Zumba is not off, it is moving. We are going to be shaking what God gave us in his house! Now I’m all for buildings that multitask but Sir Norman Foster was right when he said: ‘As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.’ Who could have known that St Anne’s Church was destined to have a Zumba class take place beneath it’s soaring wooden roof? How could they possibly have prepared for the eventuality that 20ish women wearing lycra would be gyrating to some latin pop classics on a Wednesday evening while a blond haired dance goddess shouts encouragement at them. How could they possibly have designed for that! They didn’t. There is only one toilet in there and no kitchen. There are pews. There are images of Jesus looking down at you. I’m not sure I’m philosophically ready to shake my booty in front of the Good Lord. I know he’s supposed to know what I look like when I’m sweaty and pink and that he loves me in spite of this knowledge but…. On the other hand, if I am not going to meet my maker earlier than anticipated, a girl has got to exercise, to music and in a way she enjoys, if she’s going to keep it up. So I guess I’m going to have to try and embrace the change.  

Who just abandons a car on a road in a residential area? Just leaves it there, rotting slowly, even though they know it's there because the police and the local council have been notified and have almost certainly tried to contact the owner in case it's stolen. Given the rise of bangernomics and the current depressed economic situation I'd have thought you would have no problem moving on an old car that is taxed and quite probably MOT'd for a few quid. I've got a friend who never pays more than £500 for a car and he's only had two in the last six years. He just drives them until they fall apart and then he goes and gets a new one. He buys the cars that people put on roadside verges with hand written signs inside. His three kids don't seem to mind that they travel in aged Volvos and once, a ridiculous BMW with leather seats and an air conditioning unit that could freeze fish. He bought that one for £120 as I recall. He claims it's better for the environment to carry on with the bangers rather than buy a new car. I have no idea if this is true but I do love the idea of the cars having a last hurrah with excited kids, biscuit crumbs and sand before the great crusher gets them! A car has been languishing on a side street near me since before Christmas. Just sitting there. The council couldn't do anything because it was taxed and MOT'd so they left it. It looked fine to start with, just a normal little car, but then nature started to take hold. Moss in the tyres, weeds underneath it sheltered from the elements. It started to look tatty. To (heaven forbid) lower the tone! Thankfully now the tax has expired on the car and hopefully a nice man will come and tow it away leaving us free of the blight of the old car. So much hassle and stress has been caused when the owner could have just sold it on for a couple of hundred quid and bought a week in Corfu with the proceeds and been safe in the knowledge they made someone happy in their banger.  I guess, in the words of Mr Forrest Gump, ' stupid is as stupid does'.

Summer is here so of course I’ve been on a diet so my body can be ‘beach ready’. Most of the time ‘beach ready’ means I’m on the beach and my body is ready to do stuff, but sometimes you need to take a step back and accept that your bum is spreading further than you would like. As luck would have it, I’ve started playing netball and as part of that I got referred to a certain well known weight management company for FREE! Free is my favourite four letter word. So once a week I trip off up the hill to stand on a set of scales and see if I’ve managed to dodge enough cake to make a difference. You would be amazed how much cake dodging I’ve had to do. I don’t work in an office where there’s the ubiquitous birthday cake round at least once a week but I still seem to have quite  a few people who I only see around a mound of eggs, flour, butter and sugar in baked form. It’s been relatively successful so far. I’m definitely smaller than I was and yes indeed, my clothes fit better. I’m not sure I’m ever going to have the sort of beach body that will go on a poster but it will please me immensely to not get mistaken for a seal in the water. You can probably tell I don’t take this very seriously. If it works, great, but if not, I have a great family, a lovely home and holidays on the beach so life is good anyway. A good indicator of my commitment can be seen by the fact that I turned up to one meeting the worse the wear from drink! I can highly recommend it. Put on a few pounds? NO problem, you’ve had four glasses of prosecco! Lost a few pounds, hurrah! Have another glass of prosecco! I blame my friend who encouraged me to have a quick glass in the afternoon, which led to another one and by then sweetie darling.. I couldn’t have given a damn!