Yesterday I baked a cake...

I love baking, never buy shop ones
I’ve just served up some millionaire shortbread and lemon slicesto our knitting group. One of the ladies said “Mr Kipling might make jolly good cakes but not a patch on these.”
I and my family can taste the chemicals and preservatives in mass manufactured cakes.

Yes, it is an old recipe book, and the quantities are in pounds and ounces, but here it is if anyone would like it; before starting, read the bit about the cherries.

2oz S/R flour
12oz Plain Flour
8oz butter
8oz caster sugar
1lb glace cherries
1 oz ground almonds
6 eggs

-Mix two flours together
-Beat butter & sugar to a cream
-add eggs one at a time, beat until well mixed in, to avoid
curdling may be necessary to add a little of the flour
-Lightly stir in ground almonds, then the flour
-add cherries *
-turn into lined cake tin, bake in slow oven for about 2 3/4 hours.

Oven: 350f; check for fan equivalent
Tin: 8in diameter, by 4in depth, but would suggest going up by an inch.

to avoid the usual problem of cherries sinking; wash thoroughly in luke warm water, repeat with cold water, spread out on teat towel and dry for a few hours. Cut in half before putting into cake. *This does work very well!.

This is a lovely traditional cake, and the bit that was left was cut up and used in s trifle, so no waste!

For those interested (especially Paddyanne), this is from the Lofty Peak recipe book, issued by the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society

Another tip: I paid £1.99 for 200g of glace cherries in the Co-op, in Aldi today I found the same quantity for 99p, so that knocked a couple of £ off the price of baking the next one!

Is it a Cherry Madeira ,I make one every christmas but it has more eggs in it ,Its my OH's favourite cake

I always enjoyed baking fruit cakes, there is just something about the smell of a cake baking in the oven. Then, in some cases there was the particular delight of marzipan and icing. I remember as a newly wed, wanting to do something elaborate for my grandmother’s cake and asked my young husband to get me some gum tragacanth when he was on his travels, as I could not find it locally. He went into a city centre chemist and was asked how much he wanted. He replied “About a pound I suppose, my wife needs it for icing a cake”. The reply he got from the elderly pharmacist was “Son, with that much she could ice a b——y elephant!

A cake with six eggs in it would definitely not need any other rising agent.

Baking soda came in to make it possible to get cakes with few eggs to rise.

Your recipe was probably from the days were most people had their own hen-run and baked that kind of cake when eggs were plentiful.

Homemade sponge cakes have just four familiar ingredients. The long list of chemicals and unknown additives in a bought cake should put you off buying it.

Oh, I love Dorset Apple cake.

Thought I'd better use up the over-ripe bananas so I made two banana cakes with mixed fruit.

I made a Dorset Apple cake this morning, absolutely delicious 😋

Customers pay £3 for a mug of filter coffee and a slice of cake.
That's cheap isn't it

Yes! I'll go and get my coat, I love lemon drizzle cake 😀

I used to like the Bero milk chocolate cake recipe that contained evaporated milk and years ago would use it as a base for the children’s birthday cakes, back in the days when they were happy with a rustic looking cake covered in chocolate with a few smarties on the top It’s now more economical to buy birthday cakes from the supermarket or M&S with the price of ingredients & fuel so high, the icing & decorations alone cost a fortune.

I made Nigella's chocolate brownies a couple of times using all butter and best quality chocolate
It was sooo good but very expensive.

Every week I make and donate a lemon drizzle cake for our community café. I used to cost it at £2 for a notional amount but it will be more than that. I had better cost it again.

Customers pay £3 for a mug of filter coffee and a slice of cake.
That's cheap isn't it.

I've been experimenting with sugar-free cakes, ie just leaving out the sugar altogether, not putting in alternatives. This week it was a sugar-free chocolate cake and it was fine. The lack of sugar takes a bit of getting used to but you soon don't notice. Sugar-free scones also turn out well.

I made a chocolate cake with the recipe I found on this site.It looks good and I am now in hubbies good book !!

Many years ago I made DD’s christening cake. It was a huge rich fruit cake that had 11 eggs. In those days I had no mixers and had to stir it all by hand. Exhausting. Then when I’d iced it older dd stuck her fingers in the icing as it was setting.

Some thing has gone wrong with the link. Google Soil Assocation Ultra Processed Foods and it comes up with an SA pdf called: Ultra-processed foods, The case for re-balancing the UK diet

Here is a link to what makes up UPF and what doesn't. www.soilassociation.org/media/21669/ultra-processed-foods_soil-association-report.pd]]f

It is quite complex. Supermarket industrially produced bread is a UPF. Bread from a local bakery that bakes its bread in a oven, rather than steam cooking is not.

The problem is that it is not always easy to tell them apart. We used to have a wonderful artisan bakery in our village, been there for over 30 years, suddenly closed three months ago. The baker told me elecetricity bill had gone from £250 a week to £1,800, raw ingredients have almost doubled and he cannot find any properly trained bakers.

Since then I have been trying to find proper baked bread - and it isn't easy. There are plenty of sour dough artisan bread in farm shops that look as if they are fully baked bread, folksy wrapper, unknown bakery name, phrases like, locally baked etc, but when you pick them up the crust on the top of the loaf is soft, a sure sign it was produced in an industrial oven and just finished off in a baking oven.

I too love a cake, but generally eat most. Christmas cake I’ve taken to using Fireball as my alcohol in it because I love cinnamon so much. It really doesn’t last long.

I love making cakes. I made a really lovely Victoria Sponge the other day but as I stand putting all that butter/Stork, sugar, 5 eggs etc etc the full realisation of what we are putting into our bodies really hits home. So for awhile now I largely try to adapt. For example stewed apples, ground almonds, 6 eggs, dried fruit and a spoonful of marmalade plus flour. So no sugar( except from the dried fruit and marmalade). However, a shop cake is full of all sorts and I am not “in charge” of what I eat. A Christmas cake is costly to make but is usually 8 or 9 inches in diameter and sooo much moister etc.

Just remembered bacon/ham...
Vegan/vegetarian substitutes and also ready-meals.

Well Norah, I think people do eat ultra processed foods -
Sausages, charcuterie, crisps/chocolates/ice cream.
Some eat breakfast cereals, biscuits, "bought" bread (it doesn't have to be ready-sliced type) flavoured yogurts. I certainly don’t usually drink fizzy drinks but i do have a mixer with my spirits sometimes. Even whisky, gin and rum fall into this category.

I'm sure lots of us eat Ultra Processed Foods.

I only made a cherry cake once and that used ground almonds.
It was delicious (too delicious!)

That recipe sounds like my ma in laws cherry and walnut cake. Delicious but goodness, the quantities.

I rarely bake now as I rarely eat cake and Mr C is happy with the occasional fruit cake. However I do often make meringue. Pavlova is a family favourite. I’ve discovered I can reduce the sugar content by a third without adversely impacting the end result. It almost feels healthy 😂. Bought meringue seems far to sweet to me now.

Keep baking if you enjoy it, definitely better (or less bad) for us than bought cake.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Exactly Monica.

HousePlantQueen

I too was astonished at the quantities, and also that there was no raising agent, just plain flour, plus 2 oz of self raising. Having said that, it is a lovely cake, will be enjoyed over the week, but perhaps won't be made again for a while! I have never put that many eggs in a cake before.

It sounds great!
I only use Stork, the soft tub kind, which makes a nice cake, but I do use loads of eggs, 6 or 7. They’ll raise the cake and make it yummy.Plain flour is needed cos of the fruit, to stop all the cherries from sinking.