Sticky ginger loaf

It's hard to believe that a simple two-egg cake could be so full of flavours and richness. I've been wanting to make gingerbread for ages, but have lost my cousin Rosemary's recipe - it's her signature piece. Sadly, she's too ancient to bake these days, and wasn't too sure about the recipe when I asked her a few weeks ago. So, time to try something new.

This one's from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new book, Every Day, and it's good. Really good. Is-two-slices-enough?-good. Even if you think you don't like ginger, or black treacle. AND it keeps well.

Sticky ginger loaf

75g butter
150g dark muscovado sugar
150g black treacle
150g golden syrup
75g rum
2 medium eggs
225g self-raising flour
1 tsp mixed spice
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
75g preserved ginger, chopped

Prepare a large bread tin. Heat the oven to 180C.

Melt the butter, sugar, treacle and syrup. Add the rum and beaten eggs. Sift in the flour and spices. Beat until smooth, then add the chopped ginger. Pour into the tin and bake for 50 minutes. Leave in the tin to cool.

If you like, you can brush the cold cake with a little syrup from the preserve jar.


PS Another time, I'd put in more preserved ginger. And I'd be happy to substitute the rum for ginger wine. It's just that I've got a bottle of rum no-one drinks that was old when my mother--in-law gave it to me, half empty, nearly 25 years ago.

PPS This would be good for cricket teas: one would be enough to make half slices for both teams. Great for a cold day at the start of the season.

Old-fashioned parkin

At Beamish they were making Parkin the old-fashioned way:



































































Fabulous coal range .... and did you notice the bread oven to the right? If you want to make Parkin - a kind of north country flapjack - just mix the ingredients together, shape the biscuits (or spread into a tin to cut into squares when it's cooled), and bake in a hot oven. Mmm

Nigella's rich icing for chocolate birthday cakes

This is the time of year when there are a lot of birthdays, and I have to make a lot of cake. For years, I turned to my mother-in-law's recipe for very rich chocolate refrigerator cake, a great favourite, especially when there's a crowd. Four years ago Nigella's dense chocolate loaf took over - I can be precise because I write notes on my recipe books ... here it says, amongst other things: delicious, although all over the oven.

Yesterday, I thought I'd try something new, and Nigella's always a good place to start when you're thinking of making a chocolate cake. So I chose the chocolate fudge cake from Nigella Bites.

Big mistake. I mean, it was absolutely delicious, but it also took up the whole day, AND made me late for the dinner at which it was to be served. And the usual chocolate loaf would have been just as good. Especially if I'd put the buttercream icing on it. Or the delicious chocolate brownies from How to be a Domestic Goddess that Tom's mum made for cricket teas on Saturday - I only rejected them as I thought it was a little casual for a once-a-year treat.


















Part of the problem was that the cakes rose up spectacularly in the middle: all that baking powder and bicarb. I thought at the time there was rather a lot, but I'm always a little reluctant to mess with recipes for baking. But also there was a staggering amount of fuss - I felt like a Daring Baker having an off day. And I found myself thinking that the rich are different because they have people to wash up after them - it's a long time since I've used quite so many different bowls and pans.

But the icing is worth keeping - for very special occasions, as it's solid saturated fat ... yesterday we were celebrating Lettice's 18th birthday, which seemed like a moment to throw caution to the winds.

Nigella's fudge icing

This is enough to fill and totally cover a pair of 20cm chocolate sandwich cakes. Half would comfortably cover the top of a cake.

175g dark chocolate (I used 85%)
250g butter, at room temperature
275g icing sugar, sifted
1 tbsp vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in a pan over water, or using a microwave. Beat the butter until it is creamy. Add the icing sugar. Beat more. Add the melted chocolate and vanilla.

Banana cake for Alfred's birthday

This is the cake Alfred asks for every year ... it's a really simple, quick banana loaf, absolutely his favourite. I've tried other, richer, recipes, but none of them is as popular as this. It was given to me by my friend Clare Pelling, after she brought one for a tea party here (probably before Alfred was born). I call it Clare's banana cake; Clare calls it Jane's banana bread.

This recipe is so ancient that it's in imperial, the last unconverted recipe I use (just as well I've got scales which do both). I think that the original idea was to use a pound unpeeled weight of bananas, but I've always taken it to mean the peeled weight, with the result that this tastes very banana-ry. And I use homemade vanilla essence.

Alfred's banana cake

1 1/2 oz Flora
6 oz light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 lb bananas
6 oz self-raising flour
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Turn the oven on to 180C. Line a large loaf tin. Mix the Flora with the sugar, add the eggs and vanilla essence. Add the flour and bicarb, then the bananas - I put them in whole and let my Kenwood do the work (which saves washing up, too). Sometimes I mix them very smooth, although my children like it best if I leave a few lumps of banana to discover, oozing, in the finished cake.

Pour into the tin, and bake for up to an hour. I start checking after 45 minutes.

Leave to cool in the tin. Keeps well; freezes well. Popular at cricket tea.


Links to related posts

Vanilla extract
Nigella's banana cake
Healthy banoffee pie

Links to banana cakes on other blogs

Nupur's peanut butter banana bread for Heart of the Matter
David Lebovitz's banana cake and banana loaf
Marbled banana cake from Baking Bites

Foolproof and easy fruit cake

Years ago, long before I was married, I decided to make a Simnel cake for Easter. I spent ages looking for the recipe, which I never found. I can't remember now whether or not I made the cake, but I clearly remember the frustrating search. I was too idiotic to realise that Simnel cake can be any fruit cake recipe you want - it's all in the decoration, the 11 balls of marzipan signifying the 11 true disciples, a Scripture lesson of a cake, the betrayal of Judas plain for all to see.

This particular fruit cake was the first recipe my mother-in-law ever gave me, the first or second time I met her. It's in my ancient manuscript cookery book as Lady C's easy fruit cake.

It's well named: no beating the butter and sugar, wondering if you've got enough air into the mixture; no fear of sunken fruit. You just lob the fruit, sugar and butter into a saucepan, heat it up with some water, add flour, eggs and spice - and you're done. I'm giving it as I wrote it down, the instructions and ingredient list in one.

Oh, I'm afraid it's in a curious mixture of imperial and British teacups, but this is a forgiving recipe, and where it says cup, feel free to use a slightly smaller US cookery cup measure. If you're nervous, let me know, and I'll translate it into metric.

Another thing - this is a quick and easy, make-it-at-the-last-minute sort of fruit cake - delicious, but not one to make ahead or keep until your granddaughter's christening. Good enough to dress up for a party, easy enough to make for cricket teas.

Boiled fruit cake

I use a 9" round tin for this; otherwise I double it and put it into three large loaf tins (it freezes well).

Boil:
6 oz Flora
1 cup of sugar
1 lb dried fruit
1 cup water

Add:
spice (2 tsp mixed spice is what I generally use, unless I forget)

Cool (I never have, but then it needs less time in the oven)

Beat in (in this order):
1 cup self-raising flour
1 egg
1 cup self-raising flour
1 egg

Bake at 150C / 300F for 2 hours. Start testing after an hour if you didn't cool the mixture.


Over the years, I've made this in many many different combinations. I like to make it plain with sultanas. This time, it's a superfood health mix of cranberries, blueberries, blackberries and Goji berries. It's in the oven now, and tomorrow I'll decorate it with the pistachio marzipan I made a couple of days ago.

Related posts

Extra-fruity golden cake

Links to other blogs

Sunshine fruit cake
David Lebovitz's Chocolate cherry fruitcake
A more elaborate Simnel cake

Lemon drizzle cake

It's Dick's birthday, and we're off to celebrate. I'm taking him various little presents: snowdrops from the garden, a pot of chilli jam, a kit for growing mushrooms in an old paperback book (he's a bookseller, amongst other things), and a lemon drizzle cake because DD says she can't bake.

This is the recipe:

125g Flora (or butter)
175g caster sugar
2 eggs
zest of a lemon
175g self-raising flour
4 tbsp skimmed milk

and a syrup made with
100g icing sugar (ie 4 heaped tbsp)
and the juice of 1-2 lemons (4tbsp)

Grease and line a large loaf tin (I use the all-in-one liners which you can lift out; this has the advantage that you don't have to bother greasing the tin). Preheat the oven to 180C.

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the zest and eggs, beat again, then add the flour. Then the milk. Pour this into the tin, and bake for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt the sugar in the juice and set aside. When the cake is cooked (use the skewer test), prick it all over and slowly pour the syrup onto the cake. It would rather slide down the edges than go in the holes, so you need to do this fairly slowly to make sure that there's plenty of syrup in the middle of the cake.

Don't try to remove this from the tin until it's completely cold.

Freezes well. Good for cricket teas.

Cakes for cricket tea

Harpsden Cricket Club have a fixture tomorrow - yes, that's right, tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon. It's against a touring club, and most of our players will be schoolboys (it's half term). Alfred was asked to play, but he ducked out of it, as he's pulled a thigh muscle, and he wants to be in peak condition for a game of house cricket at school next Monday. So, instead, he and I are making and serving cricket teas. I've made a mountain of cakes, and, as my freezer is already full, I'll be stuck if this game is rained off.

General instructions for cricket teas at Harpsden are to be found on our club blog, and they could well be useful for anyone having to do the teas for their club. We take it in turns to produce teas, and so there are huge variations in what's on offer - although we all stick to the format of sandwiches and cakes.

So far, I've never gone out and bought cakes - I like baking, and don't get the chance to make cake very often, for fairly obvious reasons: all that butter, all those eggs. Not the sort of thing we eat often any more in this house, although we certainly do on high days and holidays.

I always make Nigella's dense chocolate loaf cake, it's delicious, easy, and someone always asks for the recipe. Today I've also made a banana cake, because we seem to have quite a few that no-one's eating, and because it's Alfred's favourite. It's another Nigella recipe, from How to be a Domestic Goddess, the first time I've tried it. It's not so quick as my normal recipe, and I'll report back on whether it was worth the extra trouble.


Banana cake

Soak 100g sultanas in a little hot water. Melt 125g Flora and mix in 150g soft brown sugar. Put this in a big bowl (I used my Kenwood, but it would be easy to mix by hand), and beat in two eggs, then 300g banana (ie 4 small or 3 medium bananas). Once this is all mushed together, add 175g plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp bicarb. (You can mix this up beforehand, OR you can put the flour in a heap on your mix, add the BP and bicarb and mix it in with the flour before beating the whole contents of the bowl. If you see what I mean.)

Pour into one lined 2lb loaf tin or two lined 1lb loaf tins (which is what I used), and bake at 170C for 1 1/4hr or 40 minutes, depending on size.

Cool in the tin. Mine looks just as good as the one in the book - but it's easy if you use that sort of liner.

Dense chocolate loaf cake

Another treat - it seems to have been that kind of weekend. Also, I've got fed up with looking out sticky pieces of paper for the recipes that "don't go" on the blog - of course they go on the blog, it's what we eat. I make this for birthdays, cricket teas (it always disappears faster than anything else on offer), and occasionally for pudding (a very rare event in this house). It's Nigella (probably from the Domestic Goddess, although I can't be sure) - but with one crucial difference: I cook and serve it in much smaller portions. Two crucial differences - I'm not going to give you a food-porn photo, you'll just have to imagine the dense, almost toffee-ish, stickiness of this delicious cake.

The original is made in a large high-sided pan of the sort I don't possess, and of the sort I am not going out to buy on the off-chance that I'll be cooking this again. So the first time I made it, cooking for a crowd, as ever, I doubled the mixture & put it into two 2-lb loaf tins, and it rose up and made a mighty mess. What was left was good enough to make again, so next time I tried three 2lb loaf tins. Perfect. Great cakes, and some for the freezer. Yesterday, for the first time, I made the "normal" amount (outlined below), and cooked it in three one-pound loaf tins. Result.

Just one thing. It is REALLY important that you line the tins, otherwise you will never get this loaf out. It really is that sticky. I use pre-formed greaseproof liners, no bother at all. Except to remember to buy - that's why I made the smaller cakes this time: I'd run out of 2-lb liners!

Dense chocolate loaf cake

225g soft butter
375g dark muscovado sugar
2 large eggs
vanilla extract
100g dark chocolate
200g plain flour
1 tsp bicarb
250 ml boiling water

Oven Gas mark 5, 190C

Cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs and some vanilla essence. Melt the chocolate, and fold it into the mixture. Mix the bicarb with the flour, then add it to your mix, spoon by spoon, alternating with the boiling water. The result should be a smooth batter. Pour it into three 1-lb loaf tins, and bake for 30 minutes at 190C. The cake should be squidgy in the middle, so you can’t test it with a skewer.

As it cools it will sink in the middle, sometimes to the point of total collapse. It improves with keeping.

8-10 slices.