Let them not eat cake!

A wedding cake

Christians are up in arms over an abandoned scheme to hand out pieces of a huge wedding cake – baked to commemorate the forthcoming royal wedding – to UK citizens.

The massive confection has been baked at a secret location in Scotland, and the intention was to mail out a minute portion of it to every citizen in the UK.

Now it’s emerged that, as part of its comprehensive spending review, the government has scrapped plans to distribute the cake, which would have cost an estimated £40 million.

This isn’t the first time the government has scrapped something that’s already been produced. Earlier this year it emerged that four brand-new Nimrod spy planes were to be dismantled as part of the cuts programme, despite the fact that they’d never been used.

Apparently, the cake – so big that it had to be baked over two weeks in several production runs – will now go into landfill. And this is what’s upsetting Christians. But more on that in a moment.

Anti-cuts protestors are not pleased with the decision even to make the cake in first place, but are even more upset by the decision to throw it into landfill.

“It’s an outrage,” said Jonathan Couper, spokesman for Britain’s newest anti-cuts protest group, NoMoreCutsUK.

Couper told PT: “While we’re suffering welfare cuts and cuts in the defence of our country, this government can afford to throw millions of pounds at producing something as trivial as a wedding cake, and then scrap the idea. It shouldn’t have been baked in the first place, but at least the government ought to sell it off in some way.”

But why are religionists up in arms? Well, since the coalition government’s decision to scrap the huge mail-out plan, it’s been decided instead that the huge cake will be transported to a landfill site in northern England.

However, the right-wing Christian organisation Traditional Marriage Matters is furious, because it sees the destruction of the cake as sacrilege. Its spokesman, Rev. Jonah Wales, says the wedding cake has huge significance for traditional marriage and to put it into landfill would be tantamount to blasphemy.

“It emerged in Roman times, when the bridegroom broke a loaf of bread over the bride’s head to symbolise his dominance in the marriage. And that is as it should be: traditional marriage deems the man to have dominance over the subservient woman.

“Far from breaking it over a bride’s head, tipping this beautiful object into landfill is a travesty, an insult to traditional marriage and all that it stands for. We will be fighting for the cake to be cut up as planned and sold on eBay, so that people all over the UK – even the world – have a chance to partake in the wedding of the century. A traditional wedding, between a man and a woman, as God intended.

“At least that way the government stands to recoup some of the money it spent on this project.”

And Mary Croquembouche, president of the Celebratory Cake Bakers’ Association, said, “This would have been a boost to our members at a time when many of them are struggling to keep their businesses afloat during these austere times.”

Angela Battenberg, a former UK parliamentary candidate, added to the protest: “We hear all the time the government going on about how we’re ‘all in this together’,” she said, “but the great and the good will be getting cake at the wedding, something the rest of us will be denied.

“Even Marie Antoinette was in favour of the poor eating cake,” she said. “But not this mean-spirited coalition government, it seems.”

By the way, we did check out that claim about breaking a loaf of bread over a bride’s head. Seems it may be true.
__________
Update: I see Digital Journal, no less, has now picked up our story about the royal wedding cake.