You laughed, I bet you did. Yes, you. But did you ever stop to consider the real-life victims of this tragic, all-consuming addiction*?

For the desperate users up and down the country, queuing at Forfars for their next frosted fix, cake is no laughing matter.

While most healthy individuals consider themselves recreational cake users, limiting their intake to a cheeky macaroon at a church fête, or a sly slice of Battenberg when Aunt Marjorie insists, there is a growing group for whom cake has become a way of life.

"It's a greased baking tin of a slippery slope," admits one heavy user, who would prefer to remain anonymous.

"It started just at parties, christenings, that kind of thing, but then, before I knew it, I had a daily habit.

I was waking up in the mornings with flour on my sleeves, crumbs round my mouth and no idea what had happened."

A cake habit

For some, a cake habit can be the result of a traumatic childhood; raised on lunchboxes of carrot sticks and organic petit filous, sent home from birthday parties with a handful of goji berries wrapped up in a napkin, young people not properly exposed to cake in moderation are likely to fall into heavy use when offered it in later life.

Thankfully, I was not one of these children (indeed I was an early pioneer of the sugar-and-marge sandwich, best eaten in a fort made from sofa cushions).

No, I have nobody to blame but myself, Nigella, and some equally gluttonous flatmates.

I'm ready to come out of my gingerbread closet and declare "my name is Lauren Bravo, and I am a boredom baker".

Just eat it

Overlooking the obvious, that I feel a duty to carry out Marie Antionette's wishes to the last, my addiction was born out of a need to discover the Ultimate Procrastination Activity. It has been a mighty quest.

As it turns out, the ultimate work-evader is one that a) requires the maximum time possible in preparation, eating and further eating, b) has some vague semblance of being a wholesome, productive pastime, likely to make one feel like a super-efficient housewife from the fifties (a masquerade undermined not by ingrained feminist principles but by eating the mix, raw from the bowl, using a Garibaldi as a shovel), and c) leaves one in such a state of sugar-inebriation as to make revision impossible for the rest of the day.

It doesn't help the rest of the world is currently caught up in a crazed cupcake fervour. No longer the sole preserve of Sunday school picnics, cupcakes are having a comeback.

People no longer flock to Notting Hill to stand in bookshops and say "happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat", they make the pilgrimage just for the cream cheese icing at the Hummingbird bakery.

The new It bag

Cupcakes are the new It bag, but for people who eat — even dear Worthing, who I believe will accept sushi no sooner than they'll accept Teville-Gate-turns-cannabis-café development plans, has got in on the act with the glittery beauties served at Parklife in Bath Place.

But to a certified cakeaholic, making my guilty indulgence fashionable is like telling Jeremy Clarkson that stonewashed denim is having a renaissance.

Now that we've entered exam season, cake abuse has reached fever pitch.

Barely a day goes by without someone in the household succumbing to a craving — on a good day it might be a mini roll, on a bad day, kidnapping Mr Kipling (sadly aborted when we discovered we had Rudyard instead).

Of all the substance abuse problems a student can encounter, this is definitely the one given least attention on Hollyoaks.

There is no Betty Crocker counselling service.

No Jane Asher rehabilitation scheme.

In my experience, the majority of dealers consider "I can't stop buying your product and passing out in a sugar-induced fudge icing coma" to be a positive thing for their sales figures.

Sara Lee will never sell you salad, my friend. We can only help ourselves.

* To point out the beautiful irony of all-consuming" would have been to disturb my Trevor McDonald impression and risk my sterling reputation as an investigative journalist.