In the middle of my bookcase sits a very worn little book. Its cover is smattered with grease marks and sticky fingerprints show which pages have proved most popular. If it fell to the floor it would automatically open at page 176. This contains the recipe for gingerbread men, which I have cooked so often I don’t really have to refer to the book — though I do, just in case. This recipe is so good I once cut the ginger paste into Bonio shapes and featured them at a launch for one of my Paws books.

I am talking about Geraldene Holt’s Cake Stall, a Penguin Handbook that came out in 1983, three years after the hardback version, which now celebrates its 30th anniversary. Although I have hundreds of recipe books lining the walls of my cottage — many of them big and glossy and filled with photographs — this informative publication, written by an internationally acclaimed food writer, remains my favourite.

Geraldene has now updated this little gem, adding a few more recipes and tweaking some by replacing margarine with butter, for example, and taking into account some of the changes in taste and cooking techniques that have evolved over the years. Geraldene Holt’s Cakes (Prospect Books, £18) is a brilliant collection of British cakes and pastries that will please families of all ages. It certainly pleases me, though I do wonder how long it will be before my copy loses its pristine look and also becomes marked with stains as I turn the pages with sticky fingers.

Geraldene and I met in 1981 at the first Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, held just a few months after the publication of Cake Stall. We struck up a friendship then which has continued to flourish over the years. It was to Geraldene I turned when writing an article on Fuller’s walnut cake, confident that she, too, would have remembered that glorious cake with its frosted icing which Fuller’s sold many years ago in its Cornmarket tea shop. Not only did she remember it, but she was able create her own walnut cake recipe for me to try — complete with the frosted icing. It tasted every bit as good as the original.

Since we met, Geraldene has written ten more books, including French Country Kitchen, Country House Cooking and her award-winning Diary of a French Herb Garden, which details the construction of her magnificent herb garden in the south of France where she lives with her husband, Maurice, during the summer months. They spend the winter in their Oxford home. The book has already sold half a million copies.

Geraldene began cooking cakes after launching her own cake stall at Tiverton Pannier Market in Devon. Before this, she was an accomplished potter, but when adverse weather conditions ruined a whole batch of pots, she turned her back on working with clay and began adapting her artistic skills by making cakes instead.

The stall was a great success as she created a superb selection of home-baked cakes, scones and biscuits, adding her mother’s contributions to the stall too. It didn’t take customers long to realise that her cakes were far superior to those in supermarkets She said that selling directly to customers was one of the attractions in running your own cake stall as you could benefit from customers’ observations and preferences and tailor your baking to their requirements. Many customers began putting in a regular order for their favourites.

Each week, she would introduce new kinds of cakes and different biscuits to add variety to her selection, and cooked festive cakes for Christmas and Easter It wasn’t long before people were asking her for recipes and friends were advising her to turn her recipe collection into a book. It took Geraldene a year to do this as every recipe had to be tried and tested. Writing a recipe book aimed at inspiring us all to get baking is no easy task. Everything has to be checked and double checked. Despite there being no pictures in the book, it soon became a best-seller and encouraged a new generation of home cooks to start baking. I am confident that once word gets out that she has brought out a revised version, her book will become a driving force behind today’s baking resurgence.

Geraldene is a grandmother now, and is not only cooking for the young members of her extended family, but teaching them to bake, too. They all have their favourite cakes, of course, and are learning how to add extra flavour to a standard mix, and become as creative with their baking as she has been. She finds this great fun, and hopes her book will encourage other grandmothers to do the same.

Geraldene Holt’s Cakes is available in leading book stores, but if you are having problems finding it, contact the publisher on https://prospectbooks.co.uk