Tag Archives: cake

26/08/2024 · 10:47 am

Madeira Cake

I have been thinking and reading about baked goods rather a lot this year, having written Knead to Know: A History of Baking (out 12 September, preorder here). One thing I mention in the book is the activity we in Britain no longer partake in: dipping little sponge cakes in sweet alcoholic drinks. The closest we get to this is when we soak them in booze for a trifle, but fewer and fewer of us are making traditional trifles these days, I’d say.[1] Cakes made especially for dipping are well known: financiers, madeleines, boudoir biscuits (which are actually dry cakes). We used to dunk cake in wine though, and even came up with one of our own (the ones listed above are all French in origin); the now rather passe Madeira cake. It’s dismissed as a rather dry, plain sponge cake,[2] and perhaps it is, but that’s because we are no longer consuming it in the way it was designed to be, as Jane Grigson tells us in English Food, ‘this cake was served with Madeira and other sweet wines in the nineteenth century.’[3]

Madeira is a sweet wine made on the island of the same name (sugar was made there in the early modern period[4]), and it was a popular export to Britain from the seventeenth century.[5] The first time recipes for cakes specifically made for dipping in wine pop up in handwritten manuscripts from the eighteenth century, and the first printed recipe for Madeira cake (according to Laura Mason and Catherine Brown) appears in Eliza Acton’s 1845 classic Modern Cookery for Private Families.[6]

To produce a cake that can be successfully dipped without breaking up, it must be made on the dry side compared to, say, a pound cake or Victoria sponge: more flour is used, and no extra liquid is added (there’s no dropping consistency here). Whilst searching the internet for recipes, I spotted that people commonly search for ‘moist Madeira cake’ recipes. Well there is no such thing, it isn’t supposed to be moist. Yes, there are recipes to be found on the internet for apparently moist Madeira cakes that include additional ground almonds, milk and/or a reduced amount of flour. Well, you can do that, of course – be my guest, it will be delicious I’m sure – but it will no longer be a Madeira cake.

Creating lift is very important when it comes to sponge cake-making, and in Eliza Acton’s recipe, it is achieved by whisking eggs and sugar until frothy, before folding in flour mixed with a little ‘carbonate of soda’, and then cold, melted butter.[7] We’d call this a genoise-style cake these days. Recipes today use the more familiar creaming method and more raising agent, but don’t be tempted to use self-raising flour – that would give the mixture too much of a boost; we’re aiming for small, densely packed, bubbles here, so a more restrained amount of baking powder is required.

The characteristic crack of a loaf-shaped Madeira cake is most pleasing, but only achieved because a dry mixture is used.

Older recipes ask for Madeira cake to be cooked in a round tin (or hoop), but I prefer baking mine in a 900 g (2 lb) loaf tin.[8] I like the characteristic crack you get that runs down the length of the baked cake. Very pleasing. When it comes to flavouring, just a little lemon zest is traditional. Some ask for a decoration of candied citron strips, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

This recipe is adapted from the one given by Jane Grigson in her classic tome English Food,[9] first published in 1974, making it 50 years old this year!

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175 g softened, salted butter

175 g caster sugar

275 g plain flour

1 level tsp baking powder

4 large eggs (or 4 medium eggs + 1 tbs milk)

Grated zest of a lemon

Preheat your oven to 160°C, then line a 900 g (2 lb) loaf tin with baking paper.

Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy with your beaters, a most important stage as it seeds lots of air bubbles in the batter, making for a lighter cake. Now crack the eggs into the mixture one at a time: put the beater on a medium speed, add your first one, and when fully combined, add the next. If the egg and butter mixture begins to curdle (and it probably will after egg number two), add a spoonful of flour and beat on a medium-high speed until incorporated fully, then continue until all of the eggs are used up.

Mix the flour and baking powder, and tip into the mixture along with the lemon zest. Stir on a slow speed until the mixture is smooth. If your beater’s slow speed isn’t that slow, it is better to mix in the flour by hand. If you used medium eggs, add the milk at this point and mix into the batter.

Spoon the mixture into the lined loaf tin and level off. Bake for 1 hour (though check after 50 minutes) until cooked through. Do the good old test of pressing the cake with a finger: if it springs back, it is ready. You can always skewer the cake with a wooden toothpick to see if it comes out clear of any uncooked batter.

When ready, cool in the tin on a wire rack. Best eaten within the first 24 hours of baking.

Notes

[1] In Britain, the only thing we’re dunking is our biscuits in our tea.

[2] See also: seed cake.

[3] Grigson, J. (1992). English Food (Third Edit). Penguin.

[4] This is covered in Buttery, N. (2022). A Dark History of Sugar. Pen and Sword History.

[5] Mason, L., & Brown, C. (1999). The Taste of Britain. Harper Press.

[6] Ibid. I searched too and could not find an earlier example.

[7] Acton, E. (1845). Modern Cookery For Private Families. Quadrille.

[8] Most recipes, even modern ones, describe loaf tins by the weight of bread dough they are designed to bake: 450g (1 lb) or 900g (2 lb). Exact dimensions vary, but in the case of a 900g (2lb) tin, the dimensions are around 21 cm long x 11 cm wide x 7 cm high.

[9] Read my original post on Neil Cooks Grigson here.

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12/08/2024 · 12:48 pm

New book ‘Knead to Know: A History of Baking’ out 12 September 2024

Out 12 September 2024!

Exciting announcement time!

I am very pleased to announce that I have a new book out next month. It’s called Knead to Know: A History of Baking, published by Icon Books and out in the shops on 12 September 2024.

Notice it’s A history, not THE history of baking. I’ve taken what I think are the most important parts, or thing I have found the most interesting with respect to the history of this huge sprawling subject. I’ve broken it up into five broad chapters: Griddlecakes & Pancakes; Biscuits & Cakes; Bread; Pies & Puddings; and Patisserie. Really, I could have written a whole chapter on each of these subjects!

It’s in a different format to my previous books in that the chapters are broken up into short pieces, the length of a blog post. This means that you can dip in and out of it like a coffee table book, or read it cover to cover.

It’s not a recipe book, but there are lots of baking tips and rules of thumb. Of course, recipes for many of the foods that crop up in the book you can find on this blog, and I’ll be adding more as the year goes on, so keep a look out.

It is available to preorder from your favourite bookseller.

There are several upcoming events: online and in-person talks, plus festival appearances, details of which can be found on the Upcoming Events tab of the blog.

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08/03/2023 · 6:18 pm

Wigs / Whigs / Wiggs / Whiggs

Wigs – whichever way you spell them – were a type of enriched, leavened teacake. They reached a peak in popularity in the eighteenth century but may have been cooked up as early as the fifteenth.[1] It seems that they were eaten up until 1900,[2] though as with many foods, they changed their form somewhat.

Elizabeth Raffald included a recipe ‘To make Light Wigs’ in her 1769 book The Experienced English Housekeeper,[3] so I thought I would devise an updated recipe for them using modern kitchen equipment, weights and measures.

This is her recipe taken from the first edition:

As is often the case, her recipes are a mixed bag of precision and vagueness, and this one is no different: we have proportions – the most important thing, I suppose – but little else concerning mixing, shaping and baking. And what are the seeds she mentions? Luckily, by cross-referencing other recipes and others’ research, we can build up a good idea of what they were like.

Let’s dissect the recipe sentence by sentence:

  1. First of all, we have to make a simple dough of flour, milk and barm and prove it somewhere warm. Barm is the frothy yeast skimmed from fermenting vats of beer; it is from here we get our leaven. The bubbles of gas in low-gluten flour doughs with little elasticity (as would have been the case here) tend to pop quickly, so we have to assume that the dough was kneaded to develop what gluten was present.
  2. Once proved, add the butter and sugar. It’s very common, even in modern recipes, to add the enriching ingredients after the first prove. Ingredients such as these get in the way of entangling gluten strands, and their heaviness slow proving even further. These days however with our robust fast-action yeasts, I find dough rises well with all of the ingredients mixed right from the start – though I hedge my bets a little by using a mix of plain and strong white flours.
  3. Elizabeth tells us to ‘make it into Wigs’ which isn’t useful for those of us in the twenty-first century. It does inform us that they were common enough in 1769 for Elizabeth to assume we would all know the correct shape. Another recipe given in Florence white’s Good Things in England says to make wigs ‘into any shape you please’.[4] Elizabeth David helps us out here by spotting that the word wig comes from the Dutch weig, meaning wedge-shaped.[5] She thinks the round of dough would be split into sixteenths, but I think sixths or eighths would be better.
  4. As for the seeds; all other recipes state caraway seeds for wigs. I like them so much I put them in and on the dough before baking.

There are richer versions of this basic recipe. Hannah Glasse’s ‘light Wigs’ are very similar to Elizabeth’s, but she also includes a richer version (‘very good Wigs’) containing egg, cream, spices and sack.[6] Some recipes ask you to egg wash the wigs and sprinkle coarsely crushed lumps of sugar over them.[7] I opt for a milk wash and granulated sugar.

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Wigs can be eaten buttered, and when cold eat like very sweet scones, when warm they are softer and stodgier, though not in a bad way. Elizabeth suggests toasting them and pouring stewed cheese over them – a recipe for which can be found in my book Before Mrs Beeton.

My recipe makes 1 round that can be divided into 6 or 8 wigs:

5g/1 tsp yeast

5g/1 level tsp salt

180g strong white flour

180g plain white flour

120g caster sugar

1 tbs caraway seeds

120g softened salted butter

200ml warm milk, plus extra for brushing

A smear of sunflower oil

Granulated sugar for sprinkling

In a bowl, mix the yeast, salt, flours, caster sugar, and most of the caraway seeds (keep a few behind to sprinkle on the top). Make a well in the centre and add the butter and milk. Mix preferably with the dough hook of a food mixer, if not a wooden spoon – the mixture is very sticky indeed, a good 7 or 8 minutes, or until the dough is smooth.

Oil a clean bowl and place the dough inside. Cover and allow to prove in a warm place for between 60 and 90 minutes. The dough is so enriched that it doesn’t double in volume like regular bread or bun dough, but it does need to have increased in volume noticeably.

As you wait, line a 21 cm/8 inch cake tin with greaseproof paper. Elizabeth asks us to shape the wigs ‘with as little Flour as possible’, but I find that a good strewing of flour is best. The dough needs to be brought into a tight dough ball; again not as tight as is usually possible, due to all of that sugar and butter. I find a couple of dough scrapers helped a great deal at this point.

Once gathered, plop the dough into the lined tin, cover and allow to prove for 30 to 45 minutes. Using a well-floured dough scraper split the dough into 6 or 8 wedges.

It was tricky to make the cuts: flour your dough scraper very well

When the proving time is almost up, preheat your oven to 175°C and place an ovenproof dish at the bottom of the oven. When the wigs are ready to go in, put the kettle on. When boiled, finish preparing the wigs by brushing the top with milk and scattering the reserved caraway seeds and a little granulated sugar over the top, then place on a baking tray.

Open the oven door, slide the wigs onto the centre shelf, then gingerly pull out the hot ovenproof dish and pour in a good amount of hot water, then quickly but carefully slide it back in and close the oven door.

Bake for around 45 minutes until well-risen and golden brown on top. Cool on a wire rack in its tin. Serve cold or warm with butter and sliced or toasted cheese.

Notes

[1] David, E. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. (Grub Street, 1977).

[2] By this point, wigs had become a fruit cake or scone, leavened with baking powder and sweetened with candied angelica, citron peel and glacé cherries. Hartley, D. (1954) Food in England. Little, Brown & Company.

[3] Raffald, E. (1769) The Experienced English Housekeeper. First Edit. J. Harrop. Available at: https://archive.org/details/experiencedengl01raffgoog.

[4] White, F. (1932) Good Things in England. Persephone.

[5] David (1977).

[6] Glasse, H. (1747) The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Prospect Books.

[7] David (1977).

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29/12/2022 · 11:10 am

Black bun (Scotch Bun) Part 2: Recipe

My traditional yeast-leavened black bun

As promised, and carrying on from my last post, here is my recipe for the traditional yeast leavened black bun (Scotch bun). I must say I was really surprised with how well it turned out: it was enriched with so much stuff and was so huge, I thought the poor little yeast cells wouldn’t be able to do their job. I was wrong, but it did take two days to do two provings required before baking.

The white dough is essentially a sweet brioche made without eggs. When it was time to knock it back after its first rising, I was encouraged by the network of small yeasty bubbles that had formed inside the dough.

The tiny bubbles in my enriched basic dough

The bun was huge and made quite the centrepiece (though if you wanted to reduce the quantities and make a smaller one, go ahead). The cake inside was deliciously moist, and the brioche dough wonderfully buttery and thin and in such contrast with the treacle-black centre.

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It may have been big, but it kept well and was perfectly delicious well over a week after baking.

For the basic dough:

450 g plain white flour

450 g strong white bread flour

160 g caster sugar

10 g dried fast-action yeast

20 g salt

160 g softened butter

400 ml hand-hot full-fat milk

A smidge of flavourless oil

For the centre:

750 g basic dough

100 ml black treacle

400 g currants

400 g raisins

100 g candied peel

100 g slivered almonds

1 tsp mixed spice

½ tsp each ground cinnamon and allspice

2 eggs, plus 1 more for glazing

Butter for greasing

Granulated sugar

Two days before you want to bake your black bun, in the evening, make the basic dough. This is best done with an electric mixer, however don’t let me stop you attempting this by hand. Mix the dry ingredients – flours, yeast, sugar and salt – in your mixing bowl, make a well and add the butter and milk. Mix slowly with a dough hook until everything is mixed together, then turn the speed up a little and knead until smooth. Because it’s a low-gluten mixture and there’s all of that butter and sugar, it won’t be very elastic, but when it’s really smooth, you are done. It should take 8 to 10 minutes.

Paint the inside of a bowl with oil, then bundle up the sticky dough as best you can and cover with cling film. Leave to prove until around double in size. This took 18 hours: I use a low amount of yeast on purpose that the yeast ferments slowly. It may take less time for you if you used more yeast, and if your home is warmer than mine.

Knock back the dough and place 750 g of the dough in your food mixer, then add the treacle, dried fruits, candied peel, almonds, spices and eggs. Mix with a flat beater for a couple of minutes until everything looks smooth and like a Christmas cake batter. Set aside.

Take the remaining dough, form into a ball, place on a floured work surface and roll out into a large circle 32-35 cm in diameter. Make sure your pin is floured too; this will prevent sticking. With slightly wet hands, scoop the dark sticky dough and pop it in the centre of your circle. Now gather the dough so that the centre is completely covered – rather like a giant Eccles cake.

Cut away bits of the dough that have bunched up too much and glue any edges with a thin coat of beaten egg. Don’t worry if it looks a bit messy. Turn the bun over and flatten it with your hands, smoothing away any bulging bits to make a nice round shape.

Now liberally grease a 25 cm flan ring with butter and place on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper and then dusted with flour, and place the bun in the centre. Press the bun or lightly roll it with your rolling pin so that is just a centimetre off from touching the edge. Paint the top with egg and scatter over a little granulated sugar, then stab holes in the top with a thin, pointed knife right down to its base – this keeps it flat as it rises. Cover with a large plastic bag[1] and allow to prove until it has grown large enough to fill the ring. For me, this took 12 hours.

Preheat your oven to 175°C and place a heatproof tin on the bottom of the oven. When it’s time to bake the bun boil the kettle, then open the oven and slide your bun onto the middle shelf, gingerly slide the tin out enough so that you can pour in the hot water, slide it back in and close the door.

Bake at this temperature for an hour, then turn the heat down to 140°C and bake for a further 2½ hours. If the top is getting too brown, cover it with some kitchen foil.

Remove from the oven, and slide onto a cooling rack. Remove the ring when the bun is just warm.

The black bun will keep for weeks in an airtight box or tub. It is delicious eaten with sharp cheese.

Notes:

[1] I find a supermarket ‘bag for life’ is best for this task. I have one that I use only for proving things like this. Turn it over and turn up the edges, as you would your trousers to make it a sturdy shape and hey presto!

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27/12/2022 · 6:16 pm

Black Bun (Scotch Bun) Part 1: History

Before we begin: a big thank you to Scots chef and food writer Sue Lawrence for helping me out with the research for this post.

It has become a Christmas tradition of mine to ask my Twitter followers to select by Christmas post for me by way of a poll. I like to include both obvious and obscure options and was very pleased this year to see roast turkey receive no votes all (though I suppose I’ll have to write about it at some point!), and the most obscure on the list – the black bun – win out with 46% of the votes.[1]

The black bun – sometimes called a Scotch bun – is a Scottish speciality that has changed in shape and constitution through the years, but is today a type of fruit cake baked in a loaf tin lined with shortcrust pastry. It is then covered with more pastry, egg washed and baked. The cake was often made black with the addition of black treacle; Sue Lawrence says of these very rich black buns, ‘the malevolent appearance of the black inner of its shiny golden pastry case might be off-putting to some black bun virgins.’ It might come as no surprise that the bun ‘is almost invariably served with a dram of whiskey.’[2]

Black buns today are fruit cakes wrapped in pastry (pic: BBC)

It is traditional to eat black buns at Hogmanay, the Scots new year festival. Food writer and chef and Sue Lawrence writes evocatively of childhood experiences of the Hogmanay celebration:

‘As I grew up, Hogmanay…was always a time for friends and fun. Friends and neighbours would get together to have a drink and the traditional shortbread (often eaten with cheese), sultana cake, black bun and such delights as ginger and blackcurrant cordial.’[3]

For many Scots Hogmanay, was – and is – more important than Christmas Day is the Christmastide calendar. The black bun is actually the Scots’ Twelfth Cake, but the food and the party was, according to F. Marion McNeill, ‘transferred to Hogmanay after the banning of Christmas and its subsidiary festival, Uphaelieday or Twelfth Night, by the Reformers.’ Christmas Day saw a similar treatment, hence the importance of Hogmanay over other days.[4]

It’s worth mentioning that the black bun wasn’t eaten throughout Scotland: in the Highlands and islands the clootie dumpling was eaten instead.[5] I talk about the clootie dumpling and other Hogmanay foods and traditions with Ulster-Scots chef Paula McIntyre in a new episode of The British Food History Podcast published on 28 December 2022:

You may be wondering why it is called a bun. Well. If you look at older recipes, you’ll see that it was using an enriched white bread dough, a proportion of which is mixed with all of those ingredients one  might expect in a Twelfth/Christmas cake: currants, raisins (sultanas are avoided because of their paler colour), candied peel, etc. The mixture was then wrapped in the remaining dough, proved and baked. They were huge and ‘graced many a festive table in the big houses of Scotland over the centuries’, one recipe, provided by Sue Lawrence, used 15 pounds (6.8 kilos) of flour!

I first heard of the black bun, not in a Scottish cookery book as one might expect but in Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery.[6] She described it as ‘a remarkable confection’, and it is one of the few British, but not English, recipes included in the volume. Indeed, as I found out whilst researching this post, black buns were sold by Edinburgh bakers and sent as gifts all across the British Isles; so it was, at a time, well-known outside of Scotland. Because her book is on yeast cookery, Elizabeth only includes older recipes that use yeast as a leavening agent. She provides several recipes from several sources, and it is interesting to see how the bun became richer and fruitier as time went on. Black buns grew to be so enriched that it became almost impossible to leaven them using yeast, luckily this happened around the same time chemical raising agents were commercially available. At first the chemically-leavened buns were made with bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk – just like a soda bread – but over time, it became more like a regular fruit cake.[7] The pastry initially used was a huff paste – a pastry somewhere between a hot water pastry and a shortcrust. At first it wasn’t eaten, the paste simply protecting the interior, however as time went on, the pastry was swapped for a richer, more buttery shortcrust.[8]

The black bun also gets a special mention in another classic book of English food, Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England,[9] where it is described as a pastry-lined cake. Interestingly, in this book, there is a rare illustration showing the variety of shapes in which the black buns were made:

There are many fantastic recipes for the cake/pastry sort of black bun; Sue Lawrence has one in her forthcoming Scottish Baking Book, and there is one is F. Marion McNeill’s wonderful The Scot’s Kitchen[10] too, so I thought I’d give the yeast-leavened one a go.

I read through a few recipes and based mine on a recipe by Florence Jack, provided by Ms. David in her book. What I liked about it was that it seemed very black: loads of currants and raisins as well as added treacle. I did tone some of the ingredients down because it seemed to me that it enriched it simply wouldn’t rise.

I’ll let you know how I got on in the next post….

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Notes:

[1] The other two options were Brussels sprouts and buche de Noel which attained 21% and 33% of the votes respectively.

[2] Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999) The Taste of Britain. Devon: Harper Press.

[3] Lawrence, S. (2003) Sue Lawrence’s Scottish Kitchen. Headline.

[4] McNeill, F. M. (1968) The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore & Recipes. 2nd edn. Blackie & Son Limited.

[5] Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999)

[6] David, E. (1977) English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Grub Street.

[7] Hartley, D. (1954) Food in England. Little, Brown & Company.

[8] McNeill, F. M. (1968)

[9] Hartley, D. (1954)

[10] McNeill, F. M. (1968)

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07/09/2021 · 7:50 am

Cobnuts, Filberts & Hazelnuts (& Cobnut Cake)

One of my favourite seasonal foods are fresh Kentish cobnuts, and they are in season right now, so I thought I’d write a little post about them in case you see them at your local greengrocer’s shop. In the north of England they are difficult to get hold of, and when you do see them they cost a small fortune, but luckily for me, I was in London last weekend and spotted a fruit seller outside Borough Market selling big punnets at just £3.50 a pop. Up North, I’d have had to remortgage.

Cobnut season runs from late August to October in the UK, and they can – or, at least, their wild cousins can – be found growing on wild hazel trees all around the country – in fact they grow in abundance near me in Manchester. Unfortunately, the squirrels beat me to them every year. Nutting season traditionally started on 20 August on St Philibert’s Day.1

Wild, unripe Mancunian hazel/cobnuts

There’s a little confusion regarding nomenclature here, as is so often the case, some call these nuts cobnuts, others filberts, and some call them simply hazelnuts. Are there any real differences between the three or are they just regional names for the same thing? Well that all depends upon whom you ask, and when in time you ask.

Let’s start with the wild tree, the hazel, or to give its Latin name Corylus arellana. These nuts are hazels, or hazelnuts, they are elongate and flatter that the supermarket variety, but they still have the same smooth shells. This is what many people today would call a cobnut. This common tree produces nuts that was an important foodstuff for Neolithic humans, and they have been cultivated since Roman times.2,3 These cultivated trees were bred for greater yields and larger nuts changing making them more spherical in shape. These round nuts were called cobs, or cobnuts, and they are what we would call hazelnuts today. They grow so well in Kent that at one point 7000 acres of land was put aside for their cultivation, plenty to export a significant number to the United States.3

Okay, let’s, for the sake of argument, say that hazels are the wild nuts and cobnuts are their cultivated cousins, where do filberts fit in? Well, these are a larger cultivated nut from a completely different species of hazel (C. americanus).4 They were regarded as a rather upmarket orchard fruit, whilst cobnuts were considered more suitable for the hedgerow (or did they mean hazels!?).3

Today, cobnuts appear to be a catch-all term for any of the elongate forms of hazelnuts. The great thing about getting them fresh is that they have a lovely crisp, refreshing flavour, rather like water chestnut but with a mild hazelnut flavour. They are still covered in their green protective coats (shucks) and sometimes even the shell is still green. They store well and can be dried and eaten months later. An alternative to drying is to shell the fresh kernels and store them in honey. I expect the fresh kernels would make very successful pine nut replacement in pesto.

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Kentish Cobnut Cake

The best known traditional food made with cobnuts is Kentish cobnut cake. A dense cake flavoured with ginger and sweetened with some kind of unrefined sugar or honey. Some are made like a sponge cake by creaming butter and sugar, others are made by melting butter and syrup/sugar together. I go for the latter method. I found a few recipes that include a good dollop of double cream in the mix, so I’ve added it my recipe. This produces a dense cake, which I prefer, but if you want to make a lighter one, mix a teaspoon of baking powder into the flour and swap the cream for around half its volume of milk (i.e. 80 ml). Being a syrupy cake, it benefits from a couple of days’ maturing time in an air-tight box. You can use any syrup you like, or indeed any unrefined sugar. Honey works very well, especially if you have stored within it some cobnut kernels. As far as the nuts go: hazels, cobnuts or filberts all work equally well.

Makes one 8 inch/23 cm cake.

180 g butter

120 g golden syrup or honey

80 g Demerara, or any brown sugar

150 ml double cream (or 80 ml milk, if going for the lighter option)

3 knobs preserved ginger, chopped

2 eggs, beaten

240 g self-raising flour

1 tsp baking powder (optional; use if going for the lighter option)

1 ½ tbs ground ginger

100-150 g whole cobnuts, shelled weight

Preheat oven to 160°C and line a 20 cm round cake tin.

Melt the butter, syrup or honey and sugar in a saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Take off the heat and mix in the cream (or milk), chopped preserved ginger and then the eggs.

Mix the baking powder, if using, into the flour, then mix in the ground ginger and cobnuts. Make a well in the centre and pour in the butter-sugar mixture, stirring slowly with a whisk until the batter is smooth.

Pour into the lined cake tin and bake for anywhere between 1 and 1 ¼ hours. Test it is ready using a skewer. Cool in the tin.

References

1.           Wright, J. River Cottage Handbook No.7: Hedgerow. (Bloomsbury, 2010).

2.           Vaughan, J. G. & Geissler, C. A. The New Oxford Book of Food Plants. (Oxford University Press, 2009).

3.           Mason, L. & Brown, C. The Taste of Britain. (Harper Press, 1999).

4.           Johnson, O. & More, D. Collin’s Tree Guide. (Collins, 2004).

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23/05/2021 · 12:15 pm

To Make a Seed Cake

Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake – the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented with ourselves and one another.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1849

I do love a seed cake, once a key element of a British teatime table. Sadly, it’s largely either forgotten, or worse, ignored in our modern world of ‘instagrammable’ drizzle cakes, or multi-coloured creations slathered with luxurious buttercreams and frostings. With that sort of competition, the poor old seed cake doesn’t get a look in, bless it. As a result, the only way you are going to taste is to make one.

For those in the dark as to what I’m banging on about, a seed cake is a plain, rather dry cake flavoured subtly with caraway. It’s texture is similar to that of a madeira cake; dry enough so that it is perfect to have with a nice cup of tea for your elevenses. It has just the right amount of clack, as we northerners say; a tendency to stick to the roof of your mouth. Don’t let this put you off – it’s plainness is what makes it perfect. Super-sweet cakes covered with their myriad fillings are fine, but often a little too much to take.

Hannah Glasse had several seed cake recipes

Seed cakes appear in cookbooks from the seventeenth century, but only really became a cornerstone of the tea table in the eighteenth. They were a different beast then; sugary cakes also said something of both your status and sensibilities, so other things were added. Hannah Glasse added allspice, cinnamon and ambergris in one of her recipes.1 It was a time before chemical raising agents too, so cakes at this time were made light by the action of live yeast. Seed cake, therefore, was reserved for those who had a taste for the finer things in life, such as Parson Woodforde, diarist and great lover of cakes, puddings, pies and confectionary. He loved listing what he’d had for dinner. Take this entry from 17 August 1778:

7 p.m. Hot hash, or cold mutton pies. Saturday night an addition of good seed-cake of one pound, covered with sugar and a quart of good beer poured over it.2

Fast-forward a century and we see that the seed cake is pretty much what we would expect to see; the only difference being that a splash of brandy, rather than milk, is used to slacken the mixture.3

A seed cake cannot be made with any other seed than caraway. Sure, you could swap them for poppy seeds or some such, but you will have made a cake with seeds in it, not a seed cake! What’s so special about caraway then? Well, caraway was used to flavour all sorts of foods ever since ancient times, because unlike the other spices* it grew happily throughout Europe. It is an essential flavouring in German sauerkraut for example. In Britain, folk seemed to prefer to use in sweet foods, as Elizabeth David noted: “Apart from seed cake, (why were those cakes always so dry?) once the great English favourite, and caraway sweets and comfits, caraway appears little in English cooking.”4

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Elizabeth’s quote eludes as to why this cake fell out of favour – it’s viewed as boring, dry, stale perhaps, but I disagree. It is light, and because it contains very little liquid compared to, say, a moist Victoria sponge, it is paramount that the butter and sugar are well creamed together, the flour is carefully folded in without over-mixing, and that it is not over-baked. This is where I fear folk may go wrong: baking an extra ten minutes, just to be on the safe side, will produce a dry, boring cake. Done well, however, a seed cake can be as superlative as any Proustian madeleine.

175 g salted butter, softened

175 g caster sugar

3 eggs

250 g self-raising flour

1 tbs ground almonds

1 tbs caraway seeds

 Around 3 tbs milk (or brandy)

Preheat your oven to 180°C and line a 2 pound loaf tin (usually around 23 cm long) with greaseproof paper, keeping it in place with a smear of butter or cooking oil.

In a mixing bowl cream the softened butter until pale and fluffy. Add an egg and one tablespoon of the flour and beat in until smooth. Repeat with all of the eggs. Mix the remaining flour with the ground almonds and caraway seeds and tip into the mixture.

Fold in carefully and when combined, add the milk (or brandy) to loosen the batter slightly – unlike a regular sponge, you are not looking for a dropping consistency with seed cake, so don’t go overboard: start with two tablespoons and see how it looks.

Spoon into the tin and smooth the top – you don’t have to be fastidious here, as the batter cooks it levels out all on its own.

Bake for around an hour – this will depend on the dimensions of your tin, in my wide one, it took just 55 minutes. Test with a skewer if it is ready – I’ll say it again: it’s important not to overbake seeing as the batter is on the dry side.

Let it cool in its tin for 15 minutes before removing and cooling on a rack. These sorts of cakes are best eaten on the day, or the day after, they are baked.

*Mustard also grows in Europe, hence its heavy use in British recipes throughout history.

References:

1.           Glasse, H. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. (Prospect Books facsimile of the 1747 original).

2.           Woodforde, J. The Diary of a Country Parson Volume 2. (Oxford University Press, 1924).

3.           Beeton, I. The Book of Household Management. (Lightning Source, 1861).

4.           David, E. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. (Penguin, 1970).

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07/05/2020 · 5:56 pm

Summer Pudding

Summer pudding is one of the best and one of the most surprisingly versatile puddings there is. It’s also great fun to make and seeing as the first soft fruits crops are coming in, I thought I’d share my recipe with you. Before I do though, I should get the uninitiated up to speed on this quintessentially British dessert.

Summer pudding is typically a mix of red summer soft fruits lightly poached and set in a pudding basin that has been lined with berry juice-soaked white bread. For many, the thought of cold soggy bread makes them feel a little queasy, but they shouldn’t because the texture is not as one would expect; it is soft and giving and nothing like the texture of soggy bread in hot broth, for example. One way it is versatile, however, is that you can use other things in place of the bread, such as slightly stale slices of madeira or pound cake. Indeed, this is the way I prefer to make it because this way, you quickly dip the cake in the juices (otherwise it just breaks apart) unsoggy and much more pleasing in texture, rather like the base of a trifle, though a less vibrant colour. It’s swings and roundabouts isn’t it.

The other way in which it is versatile is in the fruit you can use. There are many who are purists who insist you use 100% raspberries, for others there must be at least 50% redcurrants, and some think there is no place for the strawberry. These people are all pudding fascists. I’m not picky and I go for what’s in season at the time: gooseberries, red, white or blackcurrants, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, whatever.

The summer pudding goes back to the nineteenth century as far as I can see, the earliest mention of something resembling it popping up in an American publication from 1875. It describes a hot pudding consisting of currants and sugar steamed in a basin lined with bread. I’ve also found a British ‘midsummer pudding’ that is also hot but uses a suet crust and is – oddly – more recent. A cold pudding made in the manner we know and love today appears around the turn of the twentieth century under the curious name of ‘hydropathic pudding’, so called because it was introduced to ladies at health spas as a low-calory alternative to regular stodgy suet puddings.

I have also found other recipes for autumn pudding and winter pudding, that have swapped the summer fruits for stewed apples, pears and dried fruit or blackberries, sometimes switching white bread for brown.

This is my recipe and it makes just one small pudding, unlike most other recipes that make a giant one using a re-mortgage worth of redcurrants, so this is the recipe for those who do not grow their own. In fact, all you should need are two or three punnets of soft fruit.

Serves 4:

300 g ripe soft summer fruits (raspberries, blackcurrants, red or white currants, blueberries, strawberries, gooseberries etc)

80 – 100 g caster sugar

A shot of an appropriate liqueur such as Chambourd, optional

2 or 3 slices slightly stale bread, crusts removed, or one stale madeira or pound cake, cut into 7 to 10 mm slices

To serve: clotted cream or lightly whipped double cream

Rinse the fruit, cutting any large fruits such as strawberries and gooseberries into halves or quarters as appropriate. Scatter in the sugar, but don’t make things too sweet, especially if using cake rather than bread. However, if you are using green gooseberries you many want to shake in the full quota. Pour in the liqueur if using, stir, cover and leave to macerate overnight.

Next day, put the contents of the bowl in a saucepan over a medium heat. Stir gently to dissolve the sugar, trying not to squish the fruit too much. When dissolved, bring to a boil and simmer gently for two minutes, then turn off the heat. Set aside to cool down.

Cut your slices of cake into enough pieces to line a 450 ml / 1 pint pudding basin. I cut rectangles that taper slightly at one end so that they fit nicely.

Dip each piece of cake or bread in the juicy warm fruit and press into the inside of the basin. Repeat with more slices until you have covered the sides, then cut a circle to fit in the bottom. Be careful if using cake at this point as they are prone to break when soggy.

Now spoon the fruit mixture into the pudding, packing everything in well with the back of a spoon.

Cut more cake or bread to make a lid, press down hard with fingers, then place a saucer on top with a suitable weight and place in the refrigerator overnight.

When ready to serve, loosen the pudding a little with a knife before inverting it on a plate. Be patient as the pudding leaves the mould – do not be tempted to hurrying things, lest disaster strikes. If using a plastic basin, massage it a little to help it along.

Serve with any remaining juice or fruit and the cream.

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References:

Cookery from Experience (1875) Sara T Paul

English Food (third edition; 1992) Jane Grigson

Pride and Pudding (2015) Regula Ysewijn

‘Summer Pudding’, Foods of England website http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/summerpudding.htm

‘Winter Pudding’, Foods of England website http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/winterpudding.htm

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05/01/2019 · 12:30 pm

Twelfth Night Cake

Upon the table was an immense dish, and in the dish was the biggest Twelfth-cake that the eyes of childhood had ever beheld. It was a positive monster, and whitened sugar of the most approved kind encrusted it all over.

From Little Grub, E H Knatchbull-Hugesson 1874

Twelfth Night, on the fifth day of January, is on the last day of Christmastide and was once the party highlight of the twelve-day long festival. In fact, Twelfth Night used to be the big day where gifts would be exchanged, and folk would make much merriment, very aware of the austere months ahead of them. All of this, including the cake, has moved to Christmas Day, of course.

The focal part of the Twelfth Night side-table was the elaborately-decorated Twelfth cake, essentially a rich fruit cake containing brandy, covered in a layer of rock-hard royal icing, the top groaning under the weight of sugar figures and other intricate sculptures and piping. Inside each Twelfth cake a large dried bean or pea would be baked; on the big day those who discovered them would be proclaimed king or queen for the rest of the day.

Queen Victoria’s 1849 Twelfth cake

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Some Twelfth cakes were extremely expensive, and every baker or confectioner in the land worth their salt would produce a breath-taking, awe-inspiring shop window filled with cakes of differing sizes, all covered in wonderful sugar-work. There was huge competition between confectioners to produce the best displays; and no wonder, selling any number of these bespoke cakes meant some real money had been made that winter!

Many people, of all ages and conditions, – young and old, gentle and simple, giddy and thoughtful, – stepped every hour to look through the large plate-glass window, and see the grand show of Twelfth-cakes.

From The Queen of the Twelfth-Cakes, Cuthbert Bede 1857

The Twelfth Night cake began life – like many traditional cakes did – as a yeast-leavened bread, enriched with dried fruit and ale (see also Simnel Cake). Over time, the cakes were enriched further with brandy or rum and sugar, giving it a close texture. Eventually, chemical raising agents were used to give the batter a lift.

Here’s a 1604 recipe from a lady called Elinor Fettiplace:

Take a peck of flower, and fower pound of currance, one ounce of Cinamon, half an ounce of ginger, two nutmegs, of cloves and mace two peniworth, of butter one pound, mingle your spice and flower & fruit together, but as much barme [the yeasty froth from the top of fermenting beer barrels] as will make it light, then take good Ale, & put your butter in it, saving a little, which you must put in the milk, & let the milk boyle with the butter, then make a posset with it, & temper the Cakes with the posset drink, & curd & all together, & put some sugar in & so bake it.

I would love to have a go at this recipe at some point.

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Twelfth Night cake has declined in popularity since the invention of the Christmas cake (which, incidentally, is a hybrid of a Twelfth Night Cake and Simnel Cake). Here’s the recipe that I use, which is slightly different to my Christmas cake. Notice that there are no raising agents used – I like the close-texture it gives, if you disagree, add a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda to the flour to give it a little lift.

I don’t decorate my cakes elaborately, preferring as thin a layer of icing as possible, so I use half a batch of royal icing, but if it is your thing, you might want to make a little more!

175 g softened salted butter

175 g caster or brown sugar

1 tbs black treacle

3 eggs

175 g plain flour

¼ tsp each ground cinnamon, nutmeg and mace

400 g mixed dried fruit (currants, raisins, sultanas, quartered prunes)

75 g candied peel

50 g slivered almonds

60 ml brandy, rum, strong ale (or milk)

1 dried butter bean (optional)

A half-batch of royal icing

Line and grease an 8-inch cake tin and preheat your oven to 160°C.

Cream the butter, treacle and sugar until pale and fluffy and beat in the eggs one by one before gently stirring in the flour and spices. Once incorporated, mix in the fruits, peel and nuts and stir in the booze (or milk).

Pour into the cake tin, pop in the king/queen bean, level off the top and bake for an hour. Cool in the tin.

Decorate the cake with the royal icing, being as elaborate as you like.

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25/10/2018 · 5:36 pm

King Alfred Burns the Cakes

It’s a story familiar to most of us:

King Alfred, exhausted and lost in the woods after beating the Danes in a vicious pitched battle, stumbles, bedraggled, upon a herdsman’s hut. The huntsman’s wife invites him in, and not recognising him, just assumes he is merely a soldier of Wessex, not the King! She kindly offers him rest and nourishment, as she has just put some cakes in the embers of her fire to bake.

Alfred burns the cakes

Alfred is chastised for burning the cakes

The housewife pops out to collect some more firewood, and instructs the soldier to keep an eye on the cakes whilst she is away lest they burn, but almost as soon as she is leaves, poor Alfred falls asleep. A few minutes later the housewife returns, greeted by the smell of burning cakes and a sleeping soldier:

“What sort of careless man are you, who neglects to attend to burning bread? Never have I seen so negligent a man – one who doesn’t even know how to turn ash-baked bread – and yet when it is put in front of you, you’ll no doubt rush to eat it!”

Well that’s him told!

It is assumed that this story is apocryphal, the earliest written example doesn’t appear until 300 years after the event, but I’m not so sure, it sounds like a story that would be passed down as gossip about the king. If it was made up years after the event, it would be a strange story to select; it’s not tale of derring-do, nor is it a tale of any religious significance. Is it supposed to tell us all how humble a man Alfred the Great was? What’s the moral – don’t bake cakes after pitched battle? It’s a lack of these elements, which usually appear in fantastical stories of early monarchs, that makes me think that it may be true.

Well whatever the source of the tale and the reasons for its retelling, it is a story that is almost taken for granted, but I thought I’d take a closer look at the food in this story – what were these cakes, and how were they made?

As with all food history, one needs to understand the broader historical context behind, serving as a backdrop to the food itself, setting the scene.

Alfred statue

The Statue of Alfred the Great in London (bbc.co.uk)

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King Alfred – who he?

King Alfred was a late 8th Century Anglo-Saxon king, he wasn’t king of England, because England was not yet joined into one united cohesive country, Alfred was king of Wessex. The other kingdoms in England – Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia and all been occupied and taken by the Danes, or if you prefer, the Vikings!

The security of  theKingdom of Wessex and its King sat on a knife edge, and pressure from the Danes moving into the kingdom had forced Alfred and his household to hide in the marshes of the Somerset Downs. An alternative version of the story of the cakes, says that Alfred, who so lost in thought and worry about his kingdom that he wandered into woods, got rather lost and happened upon the herdsman’s hut.

Alfred plotted and planned and managed to communicate with his allies well enough to form an army. In the year 878 he fought the Danes at Edington, which he eventually won. It was in the aftermath of this battle that he discovered the herdsman’s hut. The Battle of Edington is one of the most important events in Anglo-Saxon history, because in the months afterwards, Alfred made a peace treaty with the Danes and forced them to convert to Christianity.

Alfred had reclaimed Wessex and the Danes began to settle and assimilate with the Anglo-Saxons, making England a more cohesive place, indeed Alfred’s nephew Athelstan was the first King of all the Kingdom within England, uniting the kingdoms until his death.

9th century britain

The British Isles in the late 9th Century (britroyals.com)

Ash-Baked Cakes – what they?

For folk in mediaeval times, a home-baked loaf of bread was usually out of reach, most homes lacked a suitable oven and so relied on the oven (and skills) of local bakers. For those that lived in the futher fringes of the towns – such as herdsmen – it simply wasn’t viable to make the long trek into town, it was much easier to bake cakes on their fire.

Cast iron equipment such as griddles or waffle irons, were expensive, so many had to bake little cakes of ground cereal grain (wheat, rye or oats) directly into the embers of their fires.

Baking these cakes required both an eagle eye and excellent judgement – the outside needed to be just scorched, and the inside fluffy and warm. I must admit that I am not one for making fires or having barbeques, so I’ve not had the chance to have a go at making these devilishly difficult ember cakes. However, as soon as the opportunity arises I will, and I’ll report straight back to you guys!

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