I clocked the groceries in the bag on the kitchen floor, the tell-tale pink of the icing sugar box. In seven years, I have never known M bake. But here were the eggs, the sugar, the self-raising flour. Here sat the makings of a cake.

At first I kept my distance from the proceedings. I went out into the hut to work and occasionally clocked the pair of them in the kitchen, M with the baby up on his shoulder, working at something with his free arm. When I eventually went in the air was thick with a kind of vague domestic tension. The baby was squeaking, my ancient and rudimentary electric hand whisk was sending small clods of buttery sugar onto the floor. I offered to cream it for him, relieved that I no longer had to pretend not to know what was going on. M continued to meticulously cut out circles from baking paper. I picked up the baby, quietly switched the oven on and mentioned something about putting the butter in the microwave for five seconds on my way out.

The day wore on and I learned that M was not attempting some kind of grand patisserie but rather the “Very Easy Birthday Cake” on the BBC Good Food’s website. Undoubtedly, I love him more for this. I turned 28 days after we met and to mark the occasion then he stuck a candle in a Mr Kipling viennese whirl. Since then, I’ve organised my own birthday cakes: I am a big birthday person, he is - was - not. This year, when I idly mentioned picking up a cake, he said: “Well, I thought C and I would bake one”. And so they did.

As I pushed butter into sugar with the back of the spoon I was back in the kitchen I’d grown up in, doing the same thing in my mother’s large metal bowl. She raised us on cake: buns, the Northern parlance for fairy cakes, sat in large Tupperware for us to eat when we came home from school. Birthday cakes were a feat of fondant and that year’s childhood obsession. My sister and I still maintain she hasn’t let us in on her actual recipe for flapjack, for ours never turn out as winningly sticky.

I’ve become an adult who has shunned baking - too precise, too laboured, it somehow always makes me palpably sweaty - but in the process I forgot that I was a teenager who baked often. In watching M teach himself to make a Victoria sponge, floury iPhone in hand, I remembered the failsafe equation at the heart of the recipe: two eggs, four ounces of everything else. I remembered the white cloud that would dust the dark granite of the worktop, and the soft well I’d make for the eggs. I remembered the wrap and pull of the apron around my waist - something Rebecca May Johnson writes so well about in Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen - and watching the remnants of the batter collect on the spatula if you applied the right level of pressure as you ran it around the bowl. I remembered the spring of a cooked sponge beneath a probing finger, and the hot air smell the whole process left in my hair.

He used salted butter to make the icing and I heard my mother come out of my mouth when I said, gently: “next time, pick up some Flora”. I thought about fast-forwarding to a future where I would help C make M a cake as I stopped him from putting in too much food colouring so the icing would be the softest of pinks. My wrist gave in to muscle memory as I pulled a knife around the buttercream, smoothing it into waves. Part of me was a teenager again, standing on the other side of the kitchen, hearing my mum say: “That cake needs icing, if you fancy?” I always fancied, truth be told. There is such deep satisfaction in blending fat and sugar, watching it curdle into something new and then transforming again under the command of a bone-handed knife.

In the end, it was a good cake. The crumb was light, the rise was consistent, the sponge palest gold and sweet. The icing wasn’t too thick. M placed dark, glistening Amarena cherries around the edge and they left a pretty deluge of dark pink syrup. I put it on my favourite plate, I blew out the candles while holding the baby, there was just enough for my sweet-toothed friend to have an extra slice.