Guess the weight of the cake - THE RESULT

I made my first ever cake in over seventy years to celebrate our 30th Birthday appearance at the Spring Conference in Southport and we had a competition to guess the weight of the cake for a £1 entry fee. The prize was, of course, the cake PLUS a FREE entry to the Green Liberal Democrat Conference in Nottingham on 19th May.

We had quite a bit of interest in our competition at Southport and we had enough entries to pay for the conference delegate fee and leave a little profit too, so thank you to everyone who entered. It was a nice way to start many conversations with passing delegates that developed into discussions about Green issues and what GLD proposed to do about the environmental problems of the world.

Everyone was given the information that the cake was between 750 grams and 1,750 grams and nearly everyone took advantage of my offer to let them hold it for a couple of milliseconds. The range of guesses spanned nearly the whole range specified, but, apart from the winning guess there were only three guesses within 100 grams of the correct weight.

It actually weighed 1,400 grams exactly on my kitchen scales and, much to my surprise, one of our entries was SPOT on. I had noticed a guess of 1386 grams on the form, from Tim Styles, earlier in the day, and I was fully expecting that to be the closest anyone would manage. It was, however, the very last guess on the page that won the prize - and the winner was Tamara Galloway, who was at the Saturday Fringe meeting with Vince Cable as our guest speaker, who made the correct guess.

Tamara is a Green Party member who was visiting the Lib Dem conference as a guest, so the GLD conference in May will have at least one Green Party person there to share our thoughts... you never know whether this cake might be the catalyst for a major realignment of politics!? I think Tamara felt a little guilty at winning a Liberal cake and very kindly offered to share it with everyone at the fringe meeting, so we duly cut into the cake and everyone got a thin slice of cake each.

I have to say I was delighted with the very kind remarks about the deliciousness of my very first cake, so I can now add light sponge cakes to my quite small culinary repertoire. Doing quite well - it is only a couple of months since I added a full turkey Christmas dinner to the list. Who said you cannot teach an old dog new tricks!?