The cake is a lie

In Noel-Ann Bradshaw’s review of Cakes, Custard and Category Theory (Books, 4 June), there is a comment about how a sugar-free, wheat-free plum cake looks like and behaves similarly to a cake but “is not quite the same as a cake”. If this item does not fit within agreed categories of cake – fruit, sponge, sugar-free, and so on – then it needs a different name; a title that avoids the word cake. This would exemplify the maxim: “You can have your non-cake and eat it.”

Neil Richardson
Kirkheaton