Last month, half-baked bureaucracy banned a birthday cake cooked specially for a pensioner on his 96th birthday from being presented to him. It was feared that the Madeira cake, cooked by a friend, would expose the older people attending the celebrations to unknown food risks. Only a cake bought from a shop would be acceptable.

So, instead of a cake made lovingly from flour, butter, sugar, milk, eggs, candied peel and lemon zest, a commercial alternative, created from 39 ingredients, including food colourings, flavourings and stabilisers, was suggested.

Elaine Richards, who had baked the cake, was assured it was not about the ingredients, it was about knowing where the cake had come from. It seems that shop cakes carry a guarantee that home-made ones don't.

How very convenient for manufacturers. The more establishments, schools, fetes and carnivals that ban home-made cakes, the more people will have to turn to supermarkets for their baked goods.

I'm lucky to live in a village where home-baking is still appreciated. You only have to watch the speed with which the delicious cakes are snapped up at Eynsham's weekly Country Market (previously known as the WI Market) to realise they are as popular as ever. In fact, a queue forms every Thursday morning, long before the doors open at 9am.

Customers who fear all the cakes will be gone before they get there now place regular orders to avoid being disappointed.

It's the same at the coffee shop in the newly-established cookware store, The Emporium. Proprietor Coren Willett says it is because the cakes she offers are home-made that they are so popular. She now has regular customers who come in especially for a slice of cake to go with their coffee.

Last week saw the first round of a new awards scheme, organised by Country Markets, aimed at encouraging excellence.

Organisers of the award believe that the country market is the custodian of our traditional way of cooking and wish to celebrate this. After contestants' contributions to the market, be it savoury items, cakes, scones or other produce, are judged at village level, winners will go on to compete at county and then at national level.

My task was to judge the village contributions and come up with just one winner. Not an easy task. How do you point to one, when there are so many excellent entries?

I go by the advice given in an excellent handbook, published by the Women's Institute, entitled On With The Show, which gives guidelines for judging everything from an embroidered tablecloth to a sticky ginger cake.

The guidelines for cooked items stress that, in the end, it's the flavour that counts.

A cake's external appearance should be judged for its colour, shape and uniformity and awarded up to four marks. The internal condition of the cake, depth of crust, texture and distribution of ingredients should also be awarded up to four marks. Flavour and aroma, though, will be judged out of 12, making a total of 20 marks.

The book goes on to explain that the majority of marks are given for flavour, as it is the hallmark of home-cooking, and the guidelines for marking flavour are simple.

It's 12 for excellent, where a good balance of flavours is apparent and true to type, 11 for very good flavour which lacks just one aspect of flavour, then ten for good, but lacking in more than one aspect of flavour.

Below five suggests that the cake is not acceptable, because it was not cooked properly, had off flavours or simply was not edible. In all my years of judging, I have yet to discover a cake so badly made that it could be place in this category. Most are moist, evenly textured and delicious.

Tools for judging include a sharp knife, a clean teacloth, a couple of teaspoons and a large jug of hot water.

The hot water's probably the most important tool of all. It has to be changed constantly after the knife is cleaned between cuts. There should be no residue of the previous cake left on the knife and the cut must be a clean one.

Once the cake is cut in half, it's customary for the judge to make a small slice which can be picked up and examined then finally tasted.

Most judges have their own method for cleansing their palate between bites, so ensuring their taste buds are not affected by the previous cake. Mine is cucumber. A small slice of cucumber acts as a great cleanser and is far more effective than cold water or tea.

Judging can't be hurried, nor should it be. If someone has gone to the time and trouble of making what they consider to be the perfect cake, the least the judge can do is appreciate all aspects of their entry, which often means returning to one you tasted earlier to remind yourself of the flavour and to compare with another of equal merit.

Unfortunately, you can't give two first prizes. This means there are usually a few agonising moments when deciding on the overall winner. It's then you have to split hairs and look for something that tips the scales towards the winner.

Fortunately, the judge is never told the contestant's names all entries are anonymous.

Over the years, I have judged many such competitions and am delighted that the standard remains as high as ever. Who could possibly compare what I judged last week, baked by the good ladies of Eynsham, to those artificially-flavoured, cellophane-packed cakes adorning the supermarket shelves? There's simply no comparison.