Cooking up a Dubai storycake

After a fortnight digging around the sandlands for something resembling a scoop, a foreign hack flies home, somewhat crestfallen. If there were any crests in Dubai, which unless you count Jebel Ali "mountain" and frankly no one does, there aren't.

While plenty of reasonably interesting people, places, and practices have been spread before him during his stay, there is nothing really new. Nothing that hasn't been written about already in a thousand different articles titled "The Dubai Miracle" or some close variant.

The problem is that there is really only one Dubai storycake that wordchefs can cook up. The recipe is thus:

Dubai Storycake - Ingredients

- 4oz glittering modern city/business/hotels
- 4oz shopping malls
- 4oz construction site
- 4oz magical mega projects
- 1/4 pint stock phrases: tiny-fishing-village, pearl-of-the-Gulf, desert-kingdom, open-and-tolerant, Arab-hospitality
- teaspoon of very-westernised-for-the-ay-rab-world
- liberal sprinkling of adjectival couplets ("fast-growing" "rapidly-developing" "fast-paced" give a particularly authentic Dubayy flavour)
- dash of sympathy for poor-foreign-labourers (optional, according to taste)

Method

1. Cut ingredients from tourism brochures and paste well together
2. Stir with a thick PR-donated ladle into a impenetrably bland batter
3. Bake between the glossy sheets of advertorial pastry which paid for your trip