Nuts and Bolts: Frankenstein cakes.

First of all, what's the connection between a lady and a doughnut?

Yes, yes, there are approximately three hundred and six rude answers, but the original answer is in the dough.

An Old English lady is a hlǣfdīge, from hlāf, bread, and dīge kneader, which is related to dāh, dough.   

(A lord was a loaf keeper. This probably tells us something about relationships between men and women, but if it does I shudder to think what it might be.) 

Still, this post is really about Frankenstein cakes. No. Really, about advertising.

You have a new product and you need to tell people about it. What do you do?

Well, you probably give it a name that you think both sounds attractive and gives people some idea of what it is. The easiest way to do this is to shove in some words people understand to start with.

The current (sorry) cake saga started with Dominique Ansel's 2011 cronut (a croissant-doughnut-type thing). It caused a sensation. I mean, there really were queues in the streets.

Now, naturally, everybody's trying to get in on the act. We have the duffin (doughnut/muffin), the cruffin (croissant/muffin), crookies (croissant/cookie), townies (brownie/tart).

Because the name cronut is protected by law, we also have the crodough and the Greggsnut.

I doubt it'll stop there. Before we know it there'll be cussings (custard puddings), creepies (cream pies) and quickies (quiche bikkies).

And we'll be using doughnut and muffin simply as descriptions of the people in the queues.

Nuts and Bolts: Frankenstein cakes. The cronut was made up by Dominique Ansel. Cruffin was made up by Mr Holmes' Bakery. The Greggsnut is sold by the British bakery chain Greggs.