Spectator competition winners: Miss Havisham’s wedding cake and other recipes by fictional characters

In Competition No. 3312, you were invited to supply a contribution to a book of recipes invented by fictional characters, entries being for the Carrollean, Dickensian or Shakespearean sections.

Commendations to Martyn Hurst and Jon Robins, both of whom provided Uriah Heep’s recipe for humble pie, and to Mike Morrison’s Hamlet (‘Sous-vide or not sous-vide, that is the question…’); a dishonourable mention to Joe Houlihan’s Fagin (‘in a pilfery pie the ingredients is never the same, being, as I like to say, bestowed by the Almighty… some carrots from the parson’s garden, lifted of a black night; a pound of beefsteak, vanished from beneath the very beak of old Butcher Barnes…’); and a chef’s kiss to the winners below who earn £25.

Hack your dried, withered, decaying fruit into tiny pieces with a cold, brutally sharp knife. Stagnate in brandy, flavoured with tears of bitter abandonment. Leave overnight, abruptly, all alone. Beat butter and sugar remorselessly until they are the pale, drained colour of destroyed hopes. Break four eggs into mixture, break them like hearts and have no mercy. Add a pinch of spices, a pinch sharper than the teeth of mice. Sift flour, let it rain down like cruel words in your lover’s last letter. Scrape the miserable remains of batter into pan, slam the oven door, shut out all light. Bake at a slow, seething 150 degrees until twenty minutes to nine, then stop clocks altogether. Let it burn. Cut out heart of cake and leave ice in its place. Cover in bridal-white marzipan, allow to turn faded yellow of a shroud. When the ruin is complete, leave to rot.

Janine Beacham/Miss Havisham’s wedding cake

Whether Mrs Quilp likes it, the more so if not, I insist upon concocting my mutton curry. I go at it with gusto, furiously dicing the cheapest cut – a tinge of green in the meat never hurts me – and hurling into the pot where I’ve set oil and onions already cooking, browning away nastily.