EAT your hearts out, ladies. The man in my life not knowing the offside trap from a mousetrap, football didn't enter into our jubilee weekend programme.

Instead, we went to a sugarcraft exhibition.

The last time I mentioned sugarcraft here, I was taken severely to task by a young reader for perpetuating the traditional view of women's interests.

This time, however, it's far from traditional and, historically at least, is very much the province of the men.

Imagine, if you can, a 6ft-high table centrepiece of sugar work, surmounted by the Stuart arms. James II's ambassador to Pope Clement XI seemed to think it was necessary to impress his guests in Italy, where such things were known, not unreasonably really, as "triumphs of the table".

It was created by the man in the embassy kitchens and it hasn't been recreated for the Bowes Museum's current exhibition but some very impressive historic pieces have, including the model of old St Paul's in London whose original was constructed - and that has to be the right word - for a banquet in honour of Elizabeth I.

The French dessert setting, from the nineteenth century, extends from fondant-like sweets which, with a bit of fiddly creativity, we might make ourselves, to the triumphal arch, several elaborately ornamented obelisks and bonbonnires supported on curving sugar dolphins. Don't try that at home.

All the artists in sugar appear to have been men and their textbooks and intricate diagrams are also on show.

A little further on, we find their employers begin to cheat. The figurines are no longer sugar paste but plain, white bisque porcelain to give the same effect. As the porcelain was still so fragile that engravings were made as a record, it seems a poor economy. At least if the sugar ones broke, you could eat them, like the sugar "crockery" which was designed to be eaten.

I'd like to have known a little more about the mould makers, carving out moulds fine enough to produce a delicate monogram for Marie Antoinette (who else?) and minute parts which would come together to make heraldic devices.

We admired the sugary creature, half winged horse, half dolphin, and two or three inches long. But we were astounded when we came to the mould: how on earth had anyone carved such tiny detail so symmetrically that all the parts, legs, wings, head and tail could be stuck together - and match exactly?

And how did the sugarpaste workers get the paste out of those tiny shapes?

That's the past. The present, and a very futuristic present it is, comes in the second room. This is sugarcraft as art. Quite literally in the case of a street scene "painted" in royal icing and some vigorous abstract studies.

Be prepared for shocks. And satire. And cavorting pigs. And a glossy black icing vase, setting off scarlet poppies. And the artists are mainly women.

There's even a cake or two, traditional in shape as well, though some use extension work - lattice panels standing out from the body of the cake.

Forget you ever battled to make a birthday cake like a snooker table or the three bears' cottage (yes, been there, done that). These two rooms at the Bowes are art, craft and then some.

* The exhibition continues until September 28