Baking bad: David Cameron's sordid breadmaking revelation

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/shortcuts/2013/oct/01/david-cameron-breadmaker-baking-truth

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How to interpret the revelation that David Cameron owns a breadmaker? The fact that this information arose during an interview with LBC radio, who were probing him on the cost of supermarket value-bread to see if he understood the living costs of ordinary voters, suggests he was simply squirming out of a tricky question. Of course he doesn't know how much a loaf of Aldi Everyday Essentials medium white costs. He makes his own. Doesn't everyone? Ugh, oiks.

But this also backs up my assumption that you should never trust anyone who owns a breadmaker. As an enthusiastic – albeit massively inept – amateur baker, I know there's nothing worse than listening to someone prattle on about how they make their own bread, only to discover that all they do is dump their ingredients into a machine and bugger off for a few hours. That's not baking. That's delegation by robot.

Sure, breadmakers have their own set of problems – they can be quite hard to clean, and if you bought a cheap one you sometimes have to fish around inside the cooked loaf to retrieve the kneading hook – but these are nothing compared with what those of us who actually bake things from scratch face.

People such as David Cameron will never really experience the true frustration of breadmaking. He'll never hurt his wrists kneading an unco-operative bloomer. He'll never obsessively stare at his oven, worried that his bread is underproved. He'll never struggle to turn on his kitchen tap while trying desperately to keep the handles clean, because his hands are clagged up with wet dough. He'll never feel the same dismay I do when a loaf of bread – a perfect, golden loaf of bread that I've obsessed over for four solid hours – gets demolished in 30 seconds by three people who want a bacon sandwich.

By admitting that he owns a breadmaker, David Cameron is tacitly saying he deals with problems by offloading them on someone else and walking away. And this man is prime minister?

Honestly, if you own a breadmaker you may as well just hand your flour to a baker and let him get on with it. Or an orphan. An orphan you keep chained up in your kitchen. David Cameron basically forces imprisoned orphans to bake his bread for him. That's what I'm taking from this.

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