The well-loved cookbook challenge #8

A proper old-fashioned cake

Library picture of Lemon Drizzle Cake by AS Foodstudio, not one I’ve made myself!

For the benefit of new subscribers who are unfamiliar with the well-loved cookbook challenge it’s about revisiting the bespattered books on our shelves, the ones we go back to time after time.

It stems from one of my most popular posts where everyone piled in to share the books they loved most and prompted the idea of cooking a recipe each month from a book that’s 10 years old or older.

It’s a regular free feature on my Substack but it you’d like my weekly food, travel and moneysaving wine tips as well as other exclusive content you can subscribe for as little as £5.

As I’ve mentioned before I don’t have much of a sweet tooth but I do like a proper cake by which I mean a cake you’re more likely to eat at teatime than at any other time of day. And one you can cut into slices or wedges.

Like most rookie cooks they were the recipes I made when I first started out. Back in those days - longer ago than I care to remember - all-in-one cakes were a thing thanks to soft margarine so my first efforts were endless variations on the Victoria sponge. (I particularly liked Katie Stewart’s chocolate layer cake from her 1971* book Katie Stewart Cooks which you can find on the ckbk site if you’re a subscriber or pick up pretty cheaply online if you’re not. The recipe for apricot teabread is a winner too.

(*yes, it was that long ago!)

You definitely want one of the old school cookery writers holding your hand if you’re a baking novice. Delia or Mary Berry for preference. (My other top favourite in the early days, was Mary’s Lancashire Lemon Fingers, a traybake version of her lemon drizzle cake (above) which I still reckon is pretty hard to beat. You can find it on her website and her Ultimate Cake Book.

Sue Lawrence is another baker I trust. She used to write for Sainsbury’s magazine aeons ago when I was a regular contributor and anything I tried of hers always worked. In her book On Baking she has a chapter Cakes Which Keep which is another good criterion for being regarded as Proper Cake. You can find a used copy for £3-4 online,

I also browsed through two other books which I’ve woefully neglected: Dan Lepard’s marvellous Short & Sweet which is possibly the only baking book you actually need and contains endless invaluable tips.

Why have I never made the Butterscotch Banana Cake for instance? I love the ways he tells you exactly the weight of banana you need rather than airily saying 3 bananas or whatever. You can find the recipe on the Guardian website though it’s well worth picking up the book which you can still find at a reasonable price on Abe Books or, of course, on Am*z*n.

Then I leafed through Geraldine Holt’s equally compelling Cakes which was published by Prospect Books back in 2011, justifying the absence of accompanying photos with the firm assertion. “Cakes don’t really need pictures, they need reliable instructions.”

They continue “There has been a plethora of baking books of late, but this should not detract from the success of this most reliable and intelligent of manuals. It is not too large, it is not too small. The recipes are laid out clearly and fall conveniently to the page (a more important matter than most people think).”

I love Prospect Books.

It does indeed include a lot of really interesting and unusual cakes including a Seville Marmalade Cake, a Honey, Pistachio and Yoghurt Cake and this Apricot, Pine Nut and Cardamom Loaf which is even better as I write this post two days after baking it. (Well, you’ve got to eat cake while you’re writing about cake, right?)

It’s a fresh-tasting, modern take on a fruit cake, not inexpensive given the somewhat extravagant 400g of dried apricots it prescribes but it would easily serve the upper limit of the 12-16 people Geraldene suggests. Again you can find it on the ckbk site though I’ve dropped her a line to ask if I could share the recipe with you all. Or again you could buy the book.

Anyway what I’d really love to know is what your favourite cakes were as you were growing up, the recipes you always turn to, the ones that have subsequently become your or your family’s favourites … Which book and author would you go to for cake recipes?

PS If like me, you’re not in the habit of baking cakes why not give it a go this month? It seems a good project for March, which despite the glorious weather of the last few days can still be a bit chilly. And does drag on a bit before we finally get to April.

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