My new curtains put me in a nostalgic mood and awakened my
desire for a calmer, slower, less complicated, more comforting world than the
one we currently inhabit. So I baked a
seedcake.
Seedcake is the sort of cake that used to be served in
nurseries. It is very simple to make –
no rare ingredients to track down for this cake – and has a solid, dependable
sort of character. You may remember that
it is the cake that Bilbo Baggins had baked for his after supper morsel just
before the dwarves descended upon him and changed his life forever!
Seedcake is almost impossible to buy these days, despite
being so simple to make and satisfying to eat.
To make it, you need very few ingredients:
250 gr butter (room temperature)
250 gr sugar
500 gr flour
5 eggs
baking powder (mixed in with the flour)
caraway seeds
You whisk the butter until creamy, add the sugar, then the
eggs one by one, then the flour spoonful by spoonful, then the seeds. If the batter is too stiff you may want to
add another egg, or a bit of milk. Then
pour batter into a cake form and bake at 175 C for one hour.
This is a very basic recipe.
You can make a Madeira cake instead by replacing the seeds with candied
citrus fruit, or you can add nuts or raisins or pieces of chocolate instead.
The cake is best if wrapped in aluminium foil and left for a
day or two; it becomes more moist that way.
How many seeds you put in depends on how much you like caraway seeds; I
adore them, so I put in lots!
I had the first slice or two this afternoon, reading – what
else – the first few chapters of The Hobbit.
Seedcake and The Hobbit go very well with William Morris type
curtains…..
