Victoria Sponge Cake

To start my baking journey I decided to kick-off with a classic cake. The Victoria sponge cake is eaten throughout the UK, and owes its name to a past monarch. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria spent time at her house on the Isle of Wight, withdrawing herself from society. In order to inspire the monarch to get back into the swing of civic duties, Queen Victoria was encouraged to host tea parties, at which the soon-to-be-known-as Victoria sponge cake was served. Victoria sponges became fashionable throughout Victorian England, and also became the measure of the home-baker.

To be able to produce a well-risen home-made sponge cake is still a domestic skill keenly prized. Think of the competitive bakers of the Women's Institute, as portrayed in the UK film "Calendar Girls', where the prize-winning sponge is shockingly revealed to have come from Marks and Spencer rather than being home-made. I admit that I had never made a Victoria sponge cake, which seemed a good enough reason to try my hand at one, and test my baking abilities.

I looked at various recipes, and decided to try Nigella Lawson's recipe from the 'Domestic Goddess' book. Her recipe includes corn flour alongside the self-raising, which she claims makes for a lighter cake. Having only ever used corn flour in sauces and soups, I was intrigued. The only variation I made to her recipe was to use two table spoons of rose water, in place of two of the four table spoons of milk. I planned to fill the cake with raspberry jam, and thought the hint of rose flavouring would be a nice complement.

Nigella's method is to stick all the ingredients into the food processor. Works for me! Creaming butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy is too much hard work by hand.

So, what of the cake. Would I get the first prize at the W.I.?

Well, I was a bit disappointed by the level of rise, but at least the sponges didn't sink once they came out of the oven. However, filled with jam and fresh raspberries (another Nigella suggestion), they stacked up nicely to produce a good proportioned cake.


I decided against putting cream as well as jam in the cake. Much as I like cream, I find it a bit much in an already (butter) rich cake. The fresh fruit gives a refreshing 'bite'.


The cake was beautifully light (down to the corn flour?), which made it easy to eat an enormous slice. I hope that Queen Victoria was as pleased with her cake!

Digestive Biscuits

Digestive biscuits are one of our most popular commercially-baked biscuit varieties - the chocolate-coated version gets wolfed down in the UK at a rate of 52 biscuits a second, according to the website of United Biscuits, one of the major producers. Don’t look at me. I can probably only manage that level over the course of a full minute.

According to United Biscuits’ website; ‘The first ever digestive biscuit was created by a new young employee, Alexander Grant [in 1892 according to a United Biscuit’s Press Release, but this site, dates the biscuit to 1839]. The name Digestive was derived from its high content of baking soda as an aid to food digestion.’ This idea that baking soda aided digestion is contemporary with creation of the biscuit, and manufacturers no longer make any such claim.

As an aside, Mrs Beeton writing in 1861 says of biscuits; ‘Biscuits belong to the class of unfermented bread, and are, perhaps, the most wholesome of that class. In cases where fermented bread does not agree with the human stomach, they may be recommended: in many instances they are considered lighter, and less liable to create acidity and flatulence.’ No wonder we are such a nation of biscuit eaters (without flatulence... possibly).

The gentleman United Biscuits credits for creating the digestive biscuit worked for a Scottish bakery called McVitie & Price Ltd., founded in Edinburgh in 1830. In 1948 the company merged with another Scottish family bakery, Macfarlane, Lang & Co., Ltd., to become United Biscuits Group. Mcvitie’s name lives on as a United Biscuits’ brand, and it is the name generally synonymous with digestive biscuits in UK supermarkets - although there are many rival brands, plus supermarket-own versions.

A competing claim for the first digestive comes from another Edinburgh biscuit manufacturer. Robert Middlemass set up Middlemass’ Biscuit Factory in 1835. By 1896 production was mechanised and Middlemass produced the famous ‘Albert Biscuit’ during Queen Victoria’s reign (click here for a recipe) but the achievement he was proudest of was the ‘invention’of the digestive biscuit [sorry, I couldn’t find a date for this one]. The factory closed in 1974.

The chocolate digestive biscuit was first produced by Mcvitie & Price in 1925. They named it the ‘Homewheat Chocolate Digestive’ because the wheat used in the biscuit was grown in Britain, at a time when competitors were using imported ingredients. It was therefore (and still is) a proudly British biscuit - although perhaps the Scots should really get the lion’s share of the credit for coming up with the idea in the first place. Incidentally, it is only in the last few years that ‘Homewheat’ has been dropped from the packaging of the Mcvitie’s Chocolate Digestive after a rebrand, although a scan around the internet suggests that exported biscuits still carry this name - check out the ‘product features’ for a chocolate digestive on Amazon.com!. Don’t laugh, I think ‘snack’ , ‘teatime’,’easy dessert’ and not to mention ‘made in England’ are very important selling points.

In ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’ (Ed. Alan Davidson), Laura Mason describes the digestive biscuit as being, ‘of the pastry flour type, made from coarse brown flour. It is thick, fairly crisp, but also crumbly and, being only moderately sweet, goes well with hard English cheese. The biscuit has no particularly digestive properties and is banned for sale under that name in the USA. Alternative names are ‘wheatmeal’ and ‘sweetmeal’. Recipes for home-made digestives generally include oatmeal to give the required texture.’

I found various digestive biscuit recipes on my shelves. The earliest is from a book published in 1902 (The Queen Newspaper Cookery book series, No. 11 - Bread, cakes and biscuits, collected and described by S. Beaty-Pownall), reproduced in Andre Simon’s ‘Cereals’ (pub. 1943):

'Rub 1 lb. of butter into 5 lb.of wheatmeal; make a hollow in the centre and pour into this 4 lightly beaten up eggs, with 4 oz. sugar and 1/4 oz. of carbonate of soda; mix this all to a little pool of batter in the centre of the flour, then gradually draw down the latter from the sides with a circular motion of your fingers, moistening the dough this produced with about 1 quart of water, added by degrees, till you get it all to a nice workable consistency. Take up one-third of this dough and roll it out to the thickness of a penny; spread a clean cloth on the kitchen table; lift the dough on to the rolling-pin and roll it out again on the cloth, then cut out into oval or round cakes, prick these and place them in the oven. Finish off the rest of the dough in the same way.'

No baking temperatures or times given.

For cooking up commercial quantities (though not a batch to rival McVitie’s) you could turn to the recipe in ‘The Baker’s Repository of Recipes’, published in the late 1940s, and part of a collection of recipes representing Scotland’s bakery industry prior to 1939:

6 lb. soft flour
3 1/2 lb. wheatmeal
1/2 lb. oatmeal
2 1/2 oz. soda
2 1/2 oz. cream powder
1 1/2 lb. butter
1 1/2 lb. pure lard
4 oz. glucose
1 1/2 oz. salt
1 1/2 lb. sugar
22 oz. water

Rub fat finely through flour and make all into a dough. Allow the dough to rest, then run down through rollers. Cut out, preferably with a combination cutter. Lay on wires and bake. The dough is usually passed through rollers in canvas sheets.

This second recipe uses a combination of different flours and adds fats to the mix. It looks not too far removed from the content of today’s supermarket biscuits, but I fancied baking something a little homelier (and smaller in proportions).

110g/4 oz. medium oatmeal [I used fine oatmeal as that was already in the cupboard. By all means try medium, but I think fine will prevent the biscuit feeling too much like chipboard]
35g/1 1/2 oz. caster sugar
110g/4 oz. wholemeal flour
75g/3 oz. butter
A pinch of salt
A small pinch of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 egg

Rub butter into flour and oatmeal, add sugar, salt and soda. Bind with the beaten egg, put the dough on pastry-board sprinkled with oatmeal, and roll out. Sprinkle lightly with oatmeal, roll it in, and then cut in oval shapes. Bake in a tin in a fairly hot oven.

Recipe from ‘Farmhouse Fare - Country Recipes collected by 'Farmers Weekly’, published 1973.

(N.B. The Reader’s Digest 'Farmhouse Cookery - Recipes from the Country Kitchen', carries an almost identical recipe under the name ‘Digestion Biscuits’. The text state; 'As their name suggests, Digestion Biscuits were considered good for the stomach. Certainly, the Victorians thought so, and the biscuits - made with oatmeal and wholemeal flour - were popular in many country households.

Digestions Biscuits were sometimes eaten as an alternative to bread. They are excellent with butter and cheese.')

It was this second recipe that I used for my biscuits. I used an oven temperature of 190C, and baked for 12-14 minutes. The observant among you will spot that I dipped one face of my biscuits into dark chocolate. Well, I had to really. I did try one or two undressed biscuits, and very nice they were too, but it would have been clear foolishness not to also have tried them with chocolate.


As a point of comparison, I purchased two packs of commercially made digestives. Everyone and their aunt produce their own brand of digestives, so I chose Doves Wholewheat Digestives as Doves make the point of stating on their packaging that the biscuits are ‘Made with English Wheat’; and I selected Nairns Oat Digestives as Nairns are an Edinburgh based Scottish bakery, plus the inclusion of oats made the recipe similar to the one I baked from.


This may have placed them at a disadvantage, but neither of the other two sets of biscuit had any chocolate anywhere about them...


The biscuit tasting was carried out by myself and my junior kitchen hand. In Ellis' honest opinion they were all much of a muchness, and all samples disappeared into his tasting hatch at a fast rate. I tried him with a cheese laden biscuit, but this proved unpopular and was quickly ejected from the tasting hatch. For myself, I found the commercial biscuits dryer and crisper, with a firmer 'bite'. I couldn't discern the flavour of honey in the Nairns biscuit, and found the Doves biscuit was of similar subtle sweetness. Both stood up well to a dunking in a cup of tea (a very traditional method of consumption). My home-baked digestives had an easier texture, more crumble about them and were more interesting in the mouth. I had been concerned that the home-made biscuits would end up a little penitential - obviously, the chocolate coating helped - but they were tasty and far removed from a dry cardboard state.


Go on, you deserve a cup of tea and a biscuit...

Tunbridge Wells Wafers (or Romary Biscuits)

The family bakery of Alfred Romary was responsible for the wafer biscuit exported from the Kent spa town of Tunbridge Wells (Royal Tunbridge Wells, if you please) and sent out to Macy’s of New York, food stores in Belgium and Paris, and up to London for sale in Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, Morel Bros. Cobbett & Son Ltd., and Jacksons of Piccadilly - all purveyors of fine foods. Queen Victoria visited Alfred’s shop just before Christmas 1876, and liked the wafers so much that she granted the company a Warrant of Appointment to Her Majesty, and subsequent monarchs continued the custom - high praise indeed. Framed letters proudly displayed on the shop walls were orders for biscuits from the Queens of Yugoslavia, Spain and Romania. Tunbridge Wells Wafers were clearly enjoyed by discerning women of grand quality – do all Queens like a biscuit with a cup of tea?

Alfred Romary set up in business in 1862 at 26 Church Road, Tunbridge Wells. Initially he was classified as a ‘Water cake maker’, but it was his wafers that made his name famous around the globe. In 1926 A. Romary & Co. became a limited company when W. A. P. Lane bought it. According to Dorothy Hartley in ‘Good Things in England’ the company was sold onto Freeman’s Norwich Hollow Biscuits prior to 1932, the year her book was published. I could find no corroboration of this in the other material I read, but Romary’s did at some stage start making and selling Freeman’s Norwich Hollow biscuits (a type of rusk). In 1935 Rowntree purchased the company and built a new factory in Tunbridge Wells, although some baking continued to be carried out at Romary’s bakery in Church Road. Rowntree stopped making the Tunbridge Wells Wafers locally in 1957, a result of wartime and post-war rationing. However, in 1963 production restarted at Rowntree’s factory in Glasgow (because the Queen liked the biscuits, apparently), and continued until 1981. A final batch of biscuits was made for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Rowntree was acquired by Nestle in 1988, so the Tunbridge Wells Wafers original recipe must lie deep in the archives of this Goliath.

What made Tunbridge Wells Wafers so good that they met with royal approval? (Maybe Duchy Originals should pick up the baton and manufacture them now.) Romary’s themselves described the biscuits in a trade advertisement: ‘As thin as lace, of a flavour so delicate as to be indefinable. The clubs serve them with port, but they are also excellent with ices or at afternoon tea. Many people prefer them to sweets and chocolate. In two flavours, Sweet and Ginger.’ ‘Good Things in England’ (1932) says of Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers: ‘There are Ginger wafers, Royal wafers, water biscuits, Old English stone-ground wheaten wafer biscuits, etc., all unique and delicate eating, quite different from the ordinary biscuits however good; and distinctively English.’ Mary Ann Pike writing in ‘Town & Country, Fare & Fable’ (1978) states; ‘The wafers are about 3 inches in diameter, very delicate and lacy, and are good with cheese as well as wine.’

Wafer biscuits can be cooked by heating the raw mixture between two metal plates (think thin waffles), but Romary’s cooked their biscuits on metal trays in ovens. The paste was rolled to wafer thinness by hand, and continued to be so even after Rowntree introduced mechanisation. A spiked roller was used to make the perforations so the biscuits could be made rapidly, and quickly sent to the oven for baking. The booklet I obtained from Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery says that ‘trap ovens’ were used. Does anyone know what a trap oven is?

Although Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers were a proprietary recipe, I found on my bookshelves not one, but two possible recipes for the biscuits (and thereby proving the point that, yes, I did need to buy that book). The first is a recipe titled ‘Tunbridge Wells Cakes’, in Dorothy Gladys Spicer’s collection ‘From an English Oven’ (1948). However on closer examination her recipe is for a shortbread type biscuit flavoured with caraway seeds. It looked as if it would produce a biscuit similar to the Shrewsbury Cakes I have recently posted about, and I was pretty certain that this is not what Romary’s famous wafers would have been like. I subsequently came across another recipe for Tunbridge [Wells] Cakes on the internet - this on a site relating to the era of Jane Austen (see no. 29) - the recipe (sourced from one of two cookbooks written between 1749 and 1796) is identical to the one in ‘From an English Oven’, and predates Romary’s Tunbridge Wells Wafers by 100 years. It would be interesting to learn more about this older biscuit – perhaps they were enjoyed by genteel Regency visitors attending the Spa?

The second recipe looked closer to the mark, as this was quite different in terms of method and ingredients and I reckoned it would produce a biscuit not too far removed from the brandy snap - so definitely a contender for the description ‘delicate and lacey’. This latter recipe is in Section IV (‘Cereals’) of Andre Simon’s ‘Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ (published by The Wine and Food Society in 1945), the recipe is ascribed to Doris Lytton Toye, who wrote for Vogue magazine at that time. I decided to go with this recipe, but I would love to hear from anyone with an ‘authentic’ recipe. I baked once, and then had to refine the recipe and instructions as my first batch of biscuits was not a happy one. Ingredients and method are my revised versions:

Tunbridge Wells Wafers

150g plain flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
55g treacle (I had to decide whether this meant black treacle or golden syrup, as the term ‘treacle’ has in the past been used for both substances. I went with golden syrup as I felt that black treacle biscuits would be more of an acquired taste and golden syrup more of a crowd-pleaser, but please feel freee to try black treacle if that tickles your tastebuds.)
55g butter
55g caster sugar or soft brown sugar

1. Preheat oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2 (D. L. T. suggests cooking in a ‘very moderate oven’, so this is my approximation of that instruction – we have a fan oven).
2. Prepare two baking sheets by lining with greaseproof paper.
3. In a medium sized saucepan melt the butter, treacle and sugar. Don’t allow the mixture to become too hot - as soon as the ingredients have blended remove from the heat.
4. Sift the flour, baking powder and ginger into a bowl. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the warmed mixture, stirring to combine after every spoonful and mix to a paste. D. L. T. recommends that it is easier to handle the paste if it is used while still warm.
5. Divide into three portions. On a floured surface roll out each portion as thinly as you can. I found that the best way to work was to roll the dough out directly onto the baking sheet, use my 3 inch metal cutter to mark out the biscuits, and then to remove the surplus dough. This meant that I didn't have to try and move very thin pieces of dough.
6. Bake for about 10 minutes.
7. Allow to cool for a few minutes only, before transferring to a wire rack.

Doris Lytton Toye states that wafers are the ‘thinnest and lightest of biscuits’, but I have to tell you that initially this recipe produced a biscuit with neither of these qualities. The liquid and the dry elements of the dough did not marry well, the mixture appeared too dry and was impossible to form into a smooth paste.


I decided to add a little milk to bind the dough, which helped, but I struggled to roll the dough out as the mix continued to crumble apart. In the end I managed to use my rolling pin to both compress and roll enough of the dough to form a dozen biscuits, but there was no way of rolling to wafer thinness. The resulting ‘wafer’ was crisp to the point of hard, and although the flavour was not bad, it couldn’t make up for the tooth-snapping texture.


Compared to the brandy snap recipe I previously cooked (successfully), that uses a similar method of melting together sugar, syrup and butter, the proportion of flour seemed very high. Was the recipe in error, or was there a flaw in my technique? I had a look at a few brandy snap recipes, and I noticed that they instructed that you add the dry ingredients to the wet, whereas the recipe in 'Cereals' the contrary was the case. By working a spoonful of flour at a time into the warmed butter, treacle and sugar mixture I was able to form a smooth paste, and stop adding flour once the correct consistency had been acheived - this meant I had about 25g of flour left over - the 150g in the ingredient list above is my adjusted amount.


My adjusted recipe produced a far lighter biscuit, which still had a degree of rigidity, but in a thinner biscuit this translated into 'snap', or a delicate brittleness. The biscuits had a good tangy gingeryness. Look at how the light travels through my second wafer, compared to the sunlight neutralising first version. Now which do you think her majesty would prefer - and which would go to the corgis?



With thanks to Ian Beavis at Tunbridge Well’s Museum and Art Gallery, Karen Tayler at Tunbridge Wells Library, and ‘Anke’ at www.anke.blogs.com, all of who helped with information. Tunbridge Wells Museum sell a booklet entitled ‘Tunbridge Wells Biscuits – The Story of Romary’s’ – yours for £2.25 – please contact the museum to purchase a copy.

Christmas Cake (an escape to warmer climes)

This year I wanted to bake a Christmas cake - my first. I have made Christmas puddings and mince pies aplenty, but despite having polished off many a slice of Christmas cake I have never created my own. I love Christmas cake, love fruit cakes dense with fruit, nuts, peel, spices, and whatever other treasures can be packed in. I love the marzipan layer, and generally I like the royal icing on top (although sometimes this is too hard or too sweet). Lots of people don't seem too bothered about this element of Christmas food, some positively dislike rich fruit cakes of this type, and some (nutters) don't even like marzipan. Well, Christmas is a time of giving, and this year I wanted to give myself a lovely cake. Maybe I could also share a little of it if I felt the spirit of Christmas strongly enough.

I had a suspicion that the British Christmas cakes that enthusiasts such as myself tuck into, are not all that ancient as a tradition of the season. From my research I learnt that the oldest cake associated with the British Christmas period is the Twelfth cake (King cake or Bean cake). Many other countries have their take on this - such as France's La Couronne (or Galette) des Rois, Mexico's La Rosca de Reyes, Switzerland's Dreikönigskuchen or the Gateau des Rois of New Orleans. Twelfth cake was served on the Twelfth Day/Night of Christmas (Epiphany - the twelfth night after Christmas, a Christian holy day commemorating the visit by the Three Wise Men to the Christ child), and was a spiced fruit cake - originally a yeast-raised fruit bread or a light cake made from breadcrumbs, but by the 19th century had become more densely packed with fruit, heavier, and closer in consistency to the traditional Christmas Plum Pudding (which has a much older pedigree). Twelfth cake contained tokens (a dried bean for the King and a dried pea for the Queen) that would determine who had a one-night stand as a monarch, and those elevated could expect other party-goers to act out their every whim. The Twelfth Night feast was known also as the feast of fools, where misrule reigned and the lowest ruled over the highest, servants took precedence over their masters and chaos was celebrated. The feast itself predates Christianity and has links to the Roman feast of Saturnalia. The Puritans banned Twelfth Night activities, but with the Restoration the custom was also restored and the partying continued until late into the 19th century. In 1870 the revels came to Queen Victoria's attention and she deemed that they were irreligious and irreverent. She deleted the feast from the British calendar of feast days and festivals. But that, my friends, was not quite that. Victorian bakers, not wishing to miss out on the sale of the cakes that they produced for Twelfth Night, simply offered the same cakes for sale at an earlier date and rebranded them as Christmas cakes. According to the food historian, Bridget Ann Henisch, by the 1830s the bean and pea were no longer hidden within the cake, but instead were illustrated cards, slips of paper or ceramic figures, drawn from a hat or bag. Henisch suggests that by 1870 public enthusiasm for Twelfth Night had waned, and Christmas Eve and Day had become the focus of what had become a shorter (thanks to the Industrial Revolution) holiday period. Twelfth cakes were sometimes decorated with raised sugar figures or lattice designs, and these decorative elements continue in the use of marzipan, icing, and the odd rogue (although, some might say, obligatory) element of tastelessness on the top of Christmas cakes.

There is no single recipe for Christmas cake, and I imagine it is probably a recipe which most people feel free to adapt to suit what they like (less peel, more booze, no glace cherries, extra stem ginger etc.). It is not a recipe to be precious with, it is a generous cake both in terms of its content and its spirit. I have decided to take this notion and run with it, as the recipe I am going to bake comes from beyond the shores of Britain, I am also drawing upon the Victorian connection and my recipe comes from one of the countries that the Victorians couldn't help themselves but meddle with. That country was known by the Brits as Ceylon, and is now called Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Christmas cake is a local variation of what would have appeared on Victorian Christmas tables back home. The Sri Lankan cake is made with semolina, dried fruits, chow chow, cashew nuts, almonds, spices, rosewater, honey, brandy, butter and eggs. It is topped with a marzipan made from cashew nuts, icing-free, and is generally served cut into squares. Some of the ingredients betray the influence also of Portuguese and Dutch tastes, two other European countries that passed through.

My recipe comes from 'Cakes From Around the World'. I roughly halved the ingredients given as I only wanted to make one cake. This recipe omits the chow chow - probably because it is not an easy ingredient to find here. To see a recipe that includes it, click here.

Quantities given below will produce two 20 cm/8 inch square cakes.

115g chopped stem ginger
115g chopped mixed peel
225g raisins
225g sultanas
225g currants
225g chopped crystalized pineapple
225g chopped cashew nuts
115g chopped almonds
115g chopped bright red glace cherries
115g chopped dark red glace cherries
3 tablespoons brandy
3 tablespoons rosewater
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground mace
1 teaspoon ground cardamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
450g soft pale brown sugar
450g softened butter
225g semolina
12 large eggs, separated (you actually only use 6 of the egg whites, so keep the other 6 back for meringue making etc.)

For the cashew nut marzipan:

225g cashew nuts
450g icing sugar
1 egg white
4 tablespoons brandy
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 tablespoon rosewater
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Phew!

1. In one large bowl put the peel, fruits, nuts, brandy, rosewater, honey, vanilla extract and spices. Give a good old stir up with a metal spoon, then cover and leave overnight for some flavour mingling.
2. Line two 20 cm/8 inch square cake tines with greaseproof paper, and preheat oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2.
3. Using a hand mixer, unless you have wonderfully strong wrists, cream the sugar and softened butter until light and fluffy. On a slow speed, add the semolina and egg yolks a little at a time to avoid curdling. Take a metal spoon and stir in the fruit mixture until blended.
4. Take the 6 egg whites and whisk until they stand in peaks, then using a metal spoon stir the egg whites gently into the cake mixture.
5. Divide the cake mixture between the two cake tins and bake until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out cleanly - about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Leave the cakes to cool in their tins, then wrap in foil and set aside for 3 or 4 days to mature (you can feed with brandy during this time).
6. To make the marzipan put the nuts into a food processor and whizz until finely chopped. Add the icing sugar and other ingredients, processing at the lowest speed until the mixture comes together into a ball (my mixture seemed quite wet so I used extra icing sugar to help dry the marzipan). Dust your work surface with icing sugar and roll out the paste - you want to create a sheet large enough to cover only the top of each cake (roll into rough shapes and trim).


I decorated the top of the cake with snowflakes cut from marzipan - which looked quite tasteful and therefore my fingers felt itchy for a bit of tinsel to strew around. It was served for Christmas tea, that meal not eaten for reasons of sustenance or nutrition, but somehow necessary a few hours after the consumption of the largest lunch of the year. Several of us managed to enjoy a small piece, and found although it was bursting to the seams with fruit and nuts it was lighter than many Christmas cakes. Despite the fruitfulness of the slice, the spices were still evident, and this helped to evoke warmer climes and banished Hertfordshire drizzle. The marizpan also benefited from the extra flavourings of brandy, rosewater, almond and vanilla extract it contained, it was sweet but it didn't have the single dominating flavour that almond marzipan. If you aren't keen on marzipan usually, then I do recommend that you give this one a go - and the cake too!

Merry Christmas!

Honey Tea Bread

Motherhood shortly pending, last Friday was my final day at work. I am lucky enough to be able to take twelve months' maternity leave, and although currently the year stretches out ahead of me in a seemingly endless way, I expect that come the big arrival time will start to fly.

I was given a lovely send-off by my work friends, some of whom I have only had the pleasure of working with for a short time, but we had all bonded over coffee/tea and cake of a morning. Coffee and cake for one is never as fun (although it does mean more cake for me), so this posting I would like to write as a thank-you to the team and as a virtual coffee/tea-break for them to share in.

One of the presents I was given was a cup and saucer set, designed by someone who obviously also enjoys the finer, simple pleasures of life. The saucer has space on it for a slice of cake to accompany whatever warm beverage you are most partial to. What a work of genius.


I was also given a rather fine and cleverly designed mixing bowl. This is ergonomically shaped so that it sits both into the crook of the arm, and securely on the worktop by means of an angled base. Gary Rhodes has put his name to the range, and it is nice to think of Gary waking in the middle of the night with the idea fresh in his head, but possibly someone else did the night-time inspiration on his behalf. We shall never know…


So taking the lead from these two gifts, and also the long-standing tradition of mid-morning and mid-afternoon social refuelling, I have baked a suitable cake to accompany a pot of tea; or if you need a shot of something stronger pre-lunch, then a pot of coffee.

Across Britain home-bakers have created a wide gamut of cakes and breads well suited to accompany a nice cup of tea. I say tea, because historically we are a nation of tea drinkers. Coffee had its heyday here in the late 17th century, mainly amongst the wealthy and intellectual; but once tax on tea was reduced the coffee pot was drained and rarely refilled. Coffee remained a European preference and not an English taste, until we saw the introduction here of Italian-style coffee bars and then the emergence of the American coffee chain that I need not name; but this has been a slow percolation over the last fifty years or so. Tea is the drink of the people, a social activity as much as a refreshment. What would this country be without tea and cake; tea rooms; tea breaks; tea stops; flasks of tea; tea shops; tea and biscuits; tea dances; tea and sympathy; High Tea and Afternoon Tea? One can drink it by oneself, but a pot of tea is so much nicer placed in the middle of a table surrounded by other folk.

Tea breads come in as many different forms as there are ways of taking tea. Sweetened breads are the pre-raising agent equivalent of cakes, and the older forms of tea bread are yeast-raised doughs – think of such treats as Hot Cross buns, Chelsea buns and Saffron cake. With the introduction of baking powders in the mid-19th century, tea breads and cakes could take a different form, and could become as light as a Victoria sponge cake, or dense and delicious like Madeira cake. From these examples you will see that there are few cakes not suited to accompany a nice cuppa.

Jane Grigson gives a recipe for Fruit Tea Loaf in English Food. Ms. Grigson states that such cakes were particularly popular in Yorkshire and the North of England, where they were served at High Tea and at post-funeral get-togethers (wakes). High Tea is a Northern/Scottish meal, served early Sunday evening prior to church. It is a proper family sit-down, with copious amounts of tea and home-baked goodies. Jane also mentions that tea loaves are all the better for a few days keeping before eating – something I usually struggle with in my greed, but that I did manage to achieve this time (a big pat on the back to me).

My recipe is another take on the tea bread idea, for it makes use of tea as an ingredient – a key element in fact – the tea both rehydrates the dried fruits in the cake, and adds a depth of flavour. The recipe comes from the website of the Honey Association. I thought I would get a plug in for them ahead of National Honey Week, which runs from the 12th to the 18th of February. The recipe uses honey instead of refined sugar. As honey has a more distinct flavour than sugar, I was interested to see if I could still taste it in the finished cake – or would the tea flavour dominate?

I used Twinings Afternoon Tea in my cake. This may cause a shudder amongst tea-drinkers of a sensitive disposition, but I do have to confess that I used tea bags. We are coffee drinkers at home, so I swiped a few bags from the cupboard at work (tea tastes are far classier there). Twinings Afternoon Tea is a blend of Kenyan, Assam and Ceylon teas. It is described as having a character being 'bright and refreshing'. Well, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.

The honey also has a link with my recently departed from company. An ex-fellow worker’s father has his own bees, and the honey I used in the cake is from him. The honey was produced by busy bees in Frome, Somerset. Which by coincidence is also the county where the butter I used for slice spreading was produced.


So I soaked my fruit, made my cake and then left it to its own devices for a few days, tightly swaddled in kitchen foil. The grand unwrapping came when I had the pleasure of having my mum here for the day, and we were able to sit down and enjoy tea and cake together. The cake was lovely and moist, and after some ladylike sniffing, we judged that there seemed to be a hint of honey scent to the cake. I couldn’t really determine a flavour of honey, nor of tea, but it was pleasant enough taste-wise, although I think it could have benefited from having a little more definite flavour.


My mum brought with her a box of homemade flapjacks, so I can now look forward to several morning-coffee ‘breaks’ with a flapjack at the side of my cup. It is a tough job not working.