Exceptionally good seed cake
This is a pleasingly old-fashioned, barely sweet cake. So old-fashioned, in fact, that it has been around since medieval times. Mrs Beeton had no fewer than four seed cake recipes in her cookbook, including a Common Seed Cake and a Very Good Seed Cake, which rather begs the question, who would choose the former?
SPICE SWITCH: To make a seedier cake, use 1 ½ tsp caraway seeds, 1 tsp aniseed and 1 tbsp poppy seeds.
In A Whisper of Cardamom: Sweetly Spiced Recipes to Fall in Love With (Murdoch Books, £26), food writer and cook Eleanor Ford explores the creative use of spices in sweet dishes. These recipes from the book highlight the varied combinations that help to unlock distinctive flavour and fragrance.
Next, why not try more great recipes from the House & Garden recipe archive?
Ingredients
Serves 8
Ingredients
Method
Step 1
Line a loaf tin with baking parchment. Heat the oven to mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C. Whisk together the dry ingredients – the plain flour, ground almonds, baking powder, caraway seeds and grated nutmeg with ½tsp fine sea salt.
Step 2
In another bowl or stand mixer, cream together the butter and the caster sugar until very light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a spoonful of the flour mixture if it threatens to curdle. Then beat in the remaining flour. Finally, loosen the batter with the milk.
Step 3
Spoon into the loaf tin, level the top and dredge with the demerara sugar crystals. Bake for 55 minutes, or until the cake has a good golden crust and a skewer poked in the middle comes out clean.
Step 4
Allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool. It will keep well in a cake tin for a few days.
