SALES of home-baking ingredients have doubled in the past year as younger people revive traditional skills such as cake and bread-making, which have been in decline for 20 years. My husband is convinced a large proportion of these increased sales must be down to me.

Like the poor, demented Irish mother in Patrick McCabe's harrowing novel The Butcher Boy, who baked so furiously every time she felt a nervous breakdown coming on her family had to practically tunnel their way into the house through all the buns, I have taken to covering every available kitchen surface with tray after tray of fairy cakes when the baking mood takes me.

Up until a year-and-a-half ago, I had never even baked a cake for any of my children's birthdays. Like most of my friends, I bought them, ready decorated from the supermarket.

And why not? After all, we never learnt to bake at school, we were far too liberated for that. Women had long escaped from being chained to the kitchen stove and, as Shirley Conran said, life was too short to stuff a mushroom. So we got on with other things.

Once, in an uncharacteristic fit of domesticity, I produced a cake for my husband's birthday. This involved nipping out in my lunch hour and buying a chocolate sponge, which I filled with black cherries and covered in melted chocolate.

The chocolate was so hard the cake had to be smashed open and, since the cherries still had stones in them, it nearly choked him. The problem was, I didn't have time for such arcane culinary arts. Or so I thought.

That was more than ten years ago. Then, recently, something changed. One rainy day, confined to the house with a young baby, I decided to try to bake a cake. I stuck a round tin full of pale gloop in the oven and, half an hour later, when I opened the door it had magically turned into a beautiful pale brown sponge cake. It smelt good, it tasted good. And it was easy.

When the older children came home from school, they devoured every last crumb. And they asked for more. I was hooked. Within days, I was producing mounds of cup cakes, going on to experiment with differently coloured icings and toppings. I found it unexpectedly satisfying, relaxing and creative.

Soon I progressed to biscuits. Collecting different shaped cutters became an obsession. We made stars and angels to hang from the Christmas tree. We iced gingerbread men and decorated number shape biscuits with sweets for birthday parties.

I stumbled across the perfect chocolate cake recipe, made with ground almonds, no flour and rich, dark chocolate, in a French cookery book. I baked it for friends and relatives on special occasions or when they needed cheering up. Offering a cake, rather than flowers, gave me so much more pleasure, probably because - without wanting to sound too sickly sweet - baking is an act of love.

One of the reasons I am so passionate about it, perhaps, is that I have come to it so late. I still get a thrill every time I open the oven door and pull out - like a magician plucking a rabbit from a hat - my latest creation. The pure chemistry of it fascinates me. But I will never go so far as to wear a pinny. The supermarkets may tell me I am at the forefront of a modern trend. But there is still the nagging doubt at the back of my mind that I may just be turning into my mother.