Anciene Dainty Cake Excavated

Pastry history was made this week when building contractors carrying out routine repair work on a student accommodation complex in Hull inadvertently discovered the oldest surviving dainty cake in Europe.

Upon discovering what he thought was tasty-looking rubble, Mr Wilbur Ateham, head of the building team, immediately alerted curators from the Institute of Modern Pastry who, after lengthy laboratory anaylsis, discovered that the cake dated back to the early eighteenth century and was, most likely, smuggled out of the court of Louis XV to be reverse-engineered by British cooks.

"It's an astonishing find", explained Professor B. King, "To find any cake at all from this period, completely intact, is amazing in itself - our knowledge of this period comes only from mere fragments, crumbs [...] You can imagine our surprise - and delight - when our laboratory technicians confirmed that wht we had found was nothing less than the earliest Commercy madeleine, until now a cake that only existed in legend, myth. I broke a little bit off the corner earlier: it's quite tasty."

Once it has been cleaned, the cake will exhibited for all to see in the Institute's Isabella Beeton Wing.