There are few German things I kept when moving to the Britain’, Ute C. recalls, ‘this Dr. Oetker baking book is one of them’. She remembers how difficult it was to find a decent cake when Ute first moved over from Germany: ‘That was long before “The Great British Bake Off” became so popular’, she explains.

Ute came to the UK for several reasons, including a love for the country, which she developed after taking part in a school exchange. Whilst travelling in Britain a few years later, she also met an Englishman and they decided to move in together. Finally, Ute had always wanted to study environmental studies, a subject that, at the time, was not being taught at German universities. In 1984, she left Heilbronn in Germany and moved to the UK.

The Dr. Oetker baking book is one of the few things she brought with her immediately. At university, Ute would bake the very same marble cake that is on the book cover for fellow students, and star-shaped cinnamon cookies at Christmas time. Nowadays, she works at the Committee on Climate Change and uses the book for bake-offs in the office; her colleagues love the results. Although by now Ute has an entire collection of baking books, the Dr. Oetker recipes are still some of her favourites – not least because they remind her of baking the cakes with her grandmother as a child.

Object Information

• Year Received: early 1980s
• Year of Publication: 1979
• Publisher: Ceres Verlag
• Place of Publication: Bielefeld
• Material: Paper
• Size: 15 cm x 21 cm
• Colour: Brown, white; photograph of marble cake on cover