Lovelight chocolate chiffon cake : remembering a post war Australian childhood and an American chocolate cake

Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake’ is a distinctively Australian story that fits into a subgenre of food memoir. The food memoir is an established and important subgenre of the memoir, with American writer M.F.K. Fisher described as its mother (Waxman 2008, 364). Food memoir is traditionally seen as ‘modest and incomplete in comparison to the monumental, self promoting autobiography’ (Pettinger 2008, 135). Reflections on childhood are frequent in memoirs – childhood occupies a central position in the emerging notion of ‘self’ (Protschky 2009, 373) – and in food memoir, the story frequently traces the author’s passage from child to adult and their discovery of a passion for food (Fulton 1999; Alexander 2012; Wood 2012).