Fraudulent First Prize At The Otley Show

When I was aged seven or eight, as with any healthy country boy, I became obsessed with winning a prize in the Women's Institute bakery competition at the Otley Show.

The Otley show was an annual event which had presumably started as an agricultural enterprise - farmers showing off the robustness of their cow's udders, the obesity of their sheep and the sexual prowess of their pigs - but by the early 1980s had become a rather down-at-heel fun fair by the river, with the usual side attractions of hot-dog stands, reconstructions of medieval jousting, collections of rusting steam engines (that no one seemed to have any affection for) and far away in one tight little corner a couple of sad pigs beside a display of rosettes from happier times.

The bakery competition fascinated me, as it seemed so unlikely that people would really take cake so seriously. I set my sights on the 'Edible Animal' competition, which required the competitor to craft a convincing replica of any animal from purely edible items. I could really have chosen anything - a snake might have been easy, or some sort of amoeba - but I was determined from the start that only a biscuit hedgehog could truly triumph in this competition. I'm sure my mum sighed with relief that I didn't fixate on something more complex.

My mother sourced a reliable biscuit recipe from Mrs Gibbon up the road (yes, Colin's mum) and on the Friday night before the competition we made up a huge batch of mixture, turned it out onto the counter and styled it into a rudimentary egg shape, before slashing the rear with scissors to create the illusion of spikes and pushing two raisins in for its eyes.

I don't exagerrate when I say that the hedgehog was a masterpiece when it went into the oven, and it was only when it came that I realised an awful culinary truth: the biscuit is by nature a flat beast. They settle and subside in the oven. My beautiful hedgehog thus came out looking like it had been flattened by a tractor.

My mother came to the rescue and sourced a bread recipe, and we quickly mixed up the ingredients and I again I styled the mixture into the perfect similacrum of a hedgehog before placing it in the oven. Alas, I was to discover yet another culinary truth: bread by its very nature rises in the oven. My beloved creation came out looking like the bloated corpse of a hedgehog drowned in the river.

Being a child, bedtime was early and I could really only afford to have two baking disasters before retiring for the evening. I went to my bed in a state of distress - I had already bragged to my friends that I would see victory at the Women's Institute the following day, and I knew it would be humiliating to turn up with nothing to show for my promises.

Fortunately my mum did not give up easily, and she toiled throughout the night to produce yet a third hedgehog. She used an unleavened scone recipe to style a hedgehog in the precise format of my prototypes, and in the morning I found a perfect bready hedgehog waiting for me in the kitchen. My mood changed instantly, and once I'd knocked up some grass for him to sit on - stirring green food colouring into dessicated cocoanut - the illusion was complete.

As we walked down to the Otley Show, I was convinced that victory would be mine. Alas, we arrived to discover that my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar had also entered the competition, and her contribution was far and away better than mine. I can no longer recall what her entry was, but for the purposes of the memory project we'll say it was a beautiful model of an elephant carved out of marzipan and icing sugar.

We each placed our entries down on the trellis table and left while the Learned Judges of the Womens Institute did their work. I was extremely tense, but tried to enjoy the entertainments on offer: the dodgem cars which always broke down; the stall where you could win a dying goldfish in a plastic bag; and the joke toy van where I almost bought a model turd with a fly on it on the misunderstanding it was a comedy doughnut (my mind, I fear, was by this point bakery obesessed).

Eventually, my parents tentatively led me back into the cake tent to see how I had done. The trellis table was covered in hundreds of entries and I quickly realised that the odds were against me. I struggled to find my own contribution, but came first upon Sarah Parkar's effort, the fabulous sugar elephant with its trunk raised triuphantly in the air. Unsurprised, I saw that sitting beside it was a judges' card. So she had won. My heart sank.

I turned to leave the tent, but my mum stopped me. The judges' card had actually indicated a disqualification. Apparently, the rules stiuplated that an 'edible animal' could not simply be sculpted from sugar paste, it had to be something one would actually happily eat. I was immensely grateful, but then cursed when I saw that my entry also had a red card placed beside it. I went to collect my hedgehog and take it home to hide my shame, when I realised this was a different card. This was First Prize.

I was thrilled beyond description, and spent the rest of the day on a high. I refused my father's suggestion that we all sit down and eat my hedgehog and defended it absolutely, although I have a very distinct memory of clandestinely chewing on the grim and fibrous cocoanut grass that the hedgehog sat upon.

After a week or two, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided I could not go to the grave without knowing how my winning hedgehog had tasted. I turned him over to take a nibble from beneath - so as not to destroy his beauty - and discovered with horror that his undercarriage had turned mouldy. I tried to disguise this from my mother, however she soon discovered the decay and I was marched outside to pose for photographs with my hedgehog in the garden before it was dumped unceremoniously into the dustbin.

Future generations examining the photograph might forever have assumed I was a master baker had I not today revealed the terrible fraud that my mother and I perpetrated on the Women's Institute that day. For of course, it was really my mother - not I - who had baked that winning hedgehog.

[Time: anywhere between 1982 and 1988, I have no real idea]