Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Oats in the North, Wheat From the South: The History of British Baking, Savoury and Sweet > Status Update

Coffee & walnut cake again but with disasters - not taking into account that I was working with a fan oven meant the edges were overbaked & when I checked if the middle was baked through I caused the centre of the cake to collapse so it looked like a volcano. However I could hide this through an evil trick. Plus I had fun with a piping bag decorating the cake. & with feeding the cake with a drop of brandy...

Scones p.167 again. I like her recipe but I think her 2 centimetres is different from mine. Which reminds me of the joke: why are women so bad at parking? Because their husbands' tell them this much is six inches.

the savoy cake again. this time I intended to upgrade it to a savarin cake by stabbing it furiously with a toothpick and then force feeding it alcohol, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control, cake cutting day was brought forward before the feeding had even begun. Perhaps there is a lesson in this?

Dorsey Apple cake page 49. A simple pleasant apple cake though it had longer in the oven than the recipe said - could the oven be getting cooler? I chickened out of making the suggested custard to accompany it though it is the kind of cake that likes custard or ice cream or whipped cream.

Caraway Seed Cake page 29.

this one calls for four eggs, I have finally noticed that her recipes tended to be very eggy.
I was going to say that this means that this baking book is not so vegan friendly, but then the large amounts of butter required had already given that away.
So I could say that these recipes tend to be traditional with eggs doing most of the heavy lifting of raising the cake, it rose well

Panda cake - otherwise the coffee cake from page 35 minus the coffee with added panda. If you look on the internet for panda cakes you may see cakes with pandas stuck on top with a ring of biscuits round the edge representing bamboo, mine looked like one of those but much rougher and clumsy. I also call this cake "In a Bamboo Grove", although it does not have much to be with that story or the film Rashomon.

I wonder if as with the carrot cake, the flavour will improve over the coming days? It tasted ok on day one, though perhaps from the health point of view there was not enough walnut to counterbalance the coffee and the butter!

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I wonder if like the carrot cake, this coffee and walnut cake will mature and improve in flavour over the next few days? It tasted ok on day one

Coffee and Walnut cake page 35

Due to laziness just English/US style buttercream. A prodigious amount of butter went into the cake. The batter was delicious, but the proof of the coffee and walnut cake is in the eating as the saying goes...

Carrot cake p.31 cont.


a little wise to the ways of carrot cake I made it a day before eating, but upon consumption I realised more time for the flavours to mature would have been better! Rose beautifully, thanks to 4 eggs, slightly extravagant recipe.