My flatmate came home the other day with ingredients to prepare these traditional cakes from Lancashire (North/West of London), where she comes from. She had some left over filling and I told her not to throw it away as I would try to make another cake with it. Which I did thanks to BBC website’s recipe. It’s a very sweet cake and I actually enjoyed it more than the small Eccles cakes…
Ingredients
For the filling
- 25g butter
- 100g soft brown sugar
- 150g currants
- 50g mixed chopped peel
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon and 1tsp ground allspice
- 1 lemon, juice and finely grated zest
For the batter
- 150g pack butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
- 120g soft light brown sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 large eggs
- 250g self-raising flour
- 75g buttermilk
- 2 eating apples, peeled, cored and diced
Preparation (for a 20 cm baking tin)
- Prepare the filling:
- Melt the butter in a saucepan.
- Take it off the heat and stir in all the other ingredients until completely mixed
- Set aside.
- If you want to do the traditional Lancashire cakes, roll a puff pastry (it should be a little thicker than a £1 coin) and cut out rounds about 12 cm. Place a tbsp of mixture in the middle of each round and gather the pastry around the filling and close it. Flip them over and flatten each round to an oval until the fruit just starts to poke through. Place on a baking tray with greaseproof paper and make 2 little cuts on each cake. Bake at 200° for 15/20 minutes. That should give you something like that:
- If you want to make the cake:
- Pre heat the oven to 160°
- Whisk the butter, sugar and vanilla extract in a salad bowl
- Add the beaten eggs, then the flour, buttermilk and apples
- Pour 2/3 of the batter into a baking tin covered with greaseproof paper
- Add the filling and top with the rest of the batter
- Bake for about an hour until a knife stuck in comes out clean
- Cool in the tin
- Serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream 🙂
the talking belly 