Continuing our rock 'n' roll-meets-bakery theme of recent issues, Louise Niles of Thomas Danby College was presented with the the Sharon Foster Award by the Kaiser Chiefs last month.

Next time you watch The Apprentice, keep an eye out for what biccies Sir Alan has got on his boardroom table. Around 80% of UK business folk surveyed reckoned the quality of biscuits they offered to potential clients was crucial to swinging a deal. The report, conducted by Holiday Inn, revealed that chocolate digestives, shortbread and Hob Nobs, topped the bill, while crumbly biscuits were more likely to garner a "You're fired!"

"Heidi Klum has given Victoria Beckham a year's supply of cupcakes as a birthday present". Seeing that headline in a national newspaper, you would be forgiven for thinking that maybe the scale of world events that week (Afghanistan, Burma, food crises) didn't quite live up to their potential. Or at least not enough to edge this story off The Daily Mail's agenda.

Now there's a headline we bet you don't see every day. Before you get the wrong idea, we're not about to suggest that rancid bread should be used as some kind of - frankly unthinkable - contraceptive device.

£285,000 - that's the value of 10kg of ketamine, seized by police from the luggage of a 27 year-old Indian national at Kuala Lumpur International airport, camouflaged - ingeniously enough - as flour. Bags of white powder, eh - who'd have thought of checking that? The irony is, the way flour prices are going, people could soon be smuggling flour under the guise of ketamine.

They don't make rock stars like they used to. "I'm addicted to madeleines," is the best tale of excess that the Daily Star could get out of Alex Turner, lead singer of rock band du jour, Arctic Monkeys. He is said to be hooked on the French cakes.

See if you can match up the crypric clues to types of bread. And, yes, some of the answers made us groan too.

Aspiring brides have literally been left on the shelf at a Nottingham bakery. Paul Brown, owner of Sweet Success bakery, told a British Baker journo that the company has been busy making wedding cakes for gay men's civil partnership parties. But the high demand for groom figurines has left a pile of unwanted brides.

You may remember, three weeks ago, when Stop the Week featured a story on http://www.baby-cakes.co.uk, which makes its cakes from unconventional ingredients: nappies. Well, owner Miranda Hart got in touch to express her delight at the coverage, and concurred that the concept would have struggled in the BBC's Dragons' Den. "I quite agree - definitely not a conventional filling, but one which is literally flying out like 'hot cakes'! I don't think I would like to put myself through the Dragons' Den - I can hear their comments now 'Nappy what?', 'Cakes?', 'I wouldn't want a chocolate-filled one!' etc."

New York is widely acknowledged as the epicentre of food-to-go trends. But here's one we're hoping won't catch on in the UK: apple-smoked bacon, half-coated lengthwise by a layer of chocolate.

Yes, we know it's childish. We know it should be beneath us. But we couldn't help sniggering at some of the exhibitors' names at French bakery show Europain this week. Such schoolboy tittering is unbecoming, but to puerile Brit journalists, this is what visiting overseas trade events is all about.

Here's something to get the drill sergeant bakery production managers among you excited. This is the Exmocare BT2 watch, designed to measure workers' physiological data, such as heart rate, location, body temperature, skin temperature and moisture levels. A central database then picks up the transmitted info for analysis, and alerts the employer to any slacking. We've been wearing them on BB for weeks now and the alarm hasn't gone off once...

What's the most unappetising ingredient you could possibly imagine for a cake? Take a straw poll and you'll end up with a pretty long list before you get to babies' nappies. As unlikely an invention as it seems, the Nappy Cake is a genuine product that's available from internet retailer http://www.baby-cakes.co.uk. "Each cake is 'freshly baked' to order, and carefully handfinished," says the website. We wish we could have witnessed how this particular business venture would have fared in the Dragons' Den. However, one thing is in its favour: it's perfect for baby showers...

Debate raged on one blogging site recently about the merits of this amateur inventor's solution to that age-old riddle: how do you toast your bread evenly? This beautifully illustrated idea involves an electric motor to turn the centre shaft, and "the slow rotation of the gear shaft produces a more evenly toasted piece of bread." Comments included:

Krispy Kreme donuts play key role in neurological research, shock! New research from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine sheds light on why our brains kick into action at the sight of sweet fried dough. Subjects taking part were tested twice - after chomping down as many as eight Krispy Kreme donuts, and after fasting for eight hours. They were then shown pictures of donuts and screwdrivers, while having their brains scanned. After the eating binge, their brains registered little interest in the donut images, while the opposite was true following the fast. "The brain is able to detect what is motivationally significant. It says, not only am I hungry, but here is food," said senior author Marsel Mesulam, professor of the bloomin' obvious.

Save the rainforests by printing out your emails, not on paper, but on toast. This marvel of toaster technology is essentially a computer-controlled printer that shoots hot air rather than ink at the bread. The possibilities are endless, if slightly pointless.

Last week, Stop the Week brought you news of the first-ever outing of a hitman-turned-baker (that we know of, at least), in the new film The Baker. Despite our high hopes, it’s proven to be off-target with the critics. The Guardian called it “a slow, dim affair [that] lacks dramatic yeast”, and The Independent gave it one star and said: “[Director] Gareth Lewis’ gift for comic dialogue is doubtful and his idea of farce – a supposedly raunchy sex scene involving food – is embarrassing”. Could this mark the early death of bakery-themed cinema?

Out on DVD today is The Baker – a comedy about a hitman who has second thoughts about his career and hides out from his boss by finding work as a baker in a rural Welsh village. In light of Fosters Bakery’s successes in recruiting ex-offenders, have we stumbled across an answer to the skills shortages? Filmed in Cardiff and Abergavenny, it’s described by ex-Band of Brothers lead actor Damian Lewis as “Waking Ned meets Grosse Pointe Blank” and also stars Michael Gambon.

No, this is not a skeleton fashioned as a toast rack. It is in fact an award-winning toaster designed by student George Watson of Northumbria University, made with slip-moulded bone china. The bread glides through heating plates and drops onto the rack. Comments from Watson show him to be nothing less than a toaster philosopher: “This toaster is designed to engage the user, re-invigorating the social context of toasting by questioning everything about what we toast with today.”

Hung(a)ry for a way out of the day-to-day bakery grind? Got a mouthful of dodgy molars? Then follow Bill Farnworth, a 58-year-old former bakery engineer from Hindley, who is upping sticks to an idyllic Hungarian village “complete with a deer forest and lake... part paid for by money he saved on his teeth,” reported the Wigan Observer. Desperate to cut his whopping £12,000 quote for dental work, he travelled to Hungary where he managed to halve the bill. He said: “I gave it a go and they said that while I was out there, why didn’t I have a look at the property market?” The £6,000-plus saved helped purchase a run-down property, which he converted into a plush home – worth the equivalent of £400,000 in the UK. But we can’t help thinking that if he’d taken Dr Allinson’s dental advice last week, he’d now be living in a castle.

There were bemusing bakery goings-on at the Royal Courts of Justice last week, when embattled ex-Beatle Paul McCartney bizarrely turned up for his divorce hearing with Heather Mills, clutching a Village Bakery oven glove. So why the mitt? Apparently he uses it to keep his papers safe. When BB got hold of Village Bakery MD Michael Bell on Friday afternoon, the Currant Bun (The Sun) had already been in touch. Clearly already having got his tabloid patois down pat, the tickled bakery owner commented: “I’m not sure whether it was just because she [Mills] was too hot to handle. Or was it just because the gloves were off?”

The recently-laun-ched Back to Basics Egg n’ Muffin Toaster is a bog-standard toaster with an egg cooker unceremoniously bolted onto the side. This can cook a full English, sausages, hash browns or tomatoes and the pan detaches for easy cleaning. But why stop there? Where’s yer ketchup dispenser, builder’s tea maker and indigestion tablets?

This latest bread browning breakthrough eschews the traditional pop-up approach which, let’s face it, has become a bit passé. Its makers were literally thinking outside the box to come up with this nifty roller mechanism. You could probably laminate false passports with it too, or even straighten your hair, if you were so inclined.

Continuing the Swiss theme this week, a Swiss man was reportedly detained by airport authorities in Dubai after poppy seeds were discovered on his clothing. Officials, following a hardline on drug smuggling in the United Arab Emirates, took issue with the seeds, which apparently came from a sandwich he bought in Heathrow. In light of this crackdown, travellers are advised not to follow Dr Allinson’s toothache remedy (see above right).

In the 1940s film The Third Man, Orson Welles’ Harry Lime uttered this famous line: “In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had 500 years of peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Now we can add the world’s first cheeseburger in a tin from Swiss-based company Katadyn. The nation must be proud.

We appear to have stumbled across a whole subculture dedicating their time to toasters. At www.toaster.org you’ll find toaster art, toaster merchandise and toaster-themed e-cards. The Toaster Museum Foundation proclaims: “We are a non-profit organisation dedicated to toasters – yes, that’s correct, the kitchen appliance. Since our origin in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, our organisation has dedicated itself to educating, entertaining, and enlightening people about the history and cultural importance of the bread toaster.” It puts paid to the notion that we’re all ‘time poor’ these days.

Ever wanted to learn more about the history of Spam? Would you like it told to you via the medium of animated scraped toast? You’re a bit weird. But here you go: www.tinyurl.com/yvalfv

Toaster graffiti has been, ahem, popping up more of late. Sightings date back to 2002, from New York to Birmingham, and this recent daub was spotted in London. It could be a reference to an early Jamaican precursor to rap music, known as ‘toasting’, or it could be about elevating an everyday device to cult status. As long as it gets people eating more toast, we’re not complaining

Always at the forefront of toaster technology, Japan has once again come up trumps with Sega Toys’ Pa toaster. If you squint, it looks a bit like a cartoon panda. This marvel hits the market in June. Can you wait?

A restaurant heist turned sour, when bungling robbers mistook a $5 bag of bread rolls for a $30,000 swag bag. Donna Hayes and Benjamin Jorgensen were sent down after the failed robbery at the Cuckoo Restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, last year. The raid, which fittingly took place on April Fool’s Day, saw Jorgensen point a sawn-off shotgun at the manager and demand he hand over the bag he was carrying at the end of his shift. Aware of the contents, the manager thought it was a joke and tried explaining this to Jorgensen. Victorian County Court judge Roland Williams – generously we think – branded them a “pair of fools” and respectively jailed them for eight and seven years.

Naan bread, it’s the future! As part of the government’s recently announced obesity drive (presumably to reduce it, not promote it), it will be reintroducing cookery in schools, including teaching kids how to make a “simple curry”.

This futuristic wonder lets you see the bread as it toasts. Still at blueprint stage, the idea was developed by Inventables Concept Studio based on a transparent heating glass technology. One small failing: the glass doesn’t yet get hot enough to toast bread!

A company in the US is taking waste carbon dioxide from power station chimneys and mixing it with sodium hydroxide to make baking soda. Waste CO2, it is claimed, can be captured in baking soda, ultimately reducing the greenhouse effect, according to Joe David Jones, head of the company Skyonic, which got the idea from an old college textbook. With the current craze for marketing provenance, will we soon be seeing ‘power station provenance’ such as ‘Traditional Drax Dumplings’ or ‘Authentic Sizewell Simnel Cake’?

Ever been asked, “What would you like to drink?” and replied, “Anything” or “Whatever”? Then Singapore drinks company Out of the Box has the perfect brands for you: Anything and Whatever. Anything comes in six carbonated varieties – Cola with Lemon, Apple, Fizz Up, Cloudy Lemon and Root Beer – while Whatever is still in Ice Lemon Tea, Peach Tea, Jasmine Green Tea, White Grape Tea, Apple Tea and Chrysanthemum Tea variants. The twist is you don’t know which you’re getting until you taste it! The drinks are reportedly creating a buzz among teens. What next? Mystery muffins, perhaps?

Tinone has developed a device that brands your toast with your football team’s initials or national flag. At Ipswich Football Club, they sold out within two days – at a crisp £45 a pop!