The cake that started it all. I had found myself tiring of staring at screens, and with an inordinate amount of energy, with the house to myself. For some reason, this led me to the desire to figure out baking.
Recipe after the break.
Ingredients
- 1 cup combined maple/golden syrup (liquid honey in recipe)
- 1 cup water
- 1 1/2 cups raisins (chopped dates in recipe)
- 50g butter (plus a bit more for greasing the cake tin)
- 1 teaspoon imitation vanilla essence (or non-imitation, but imitation is cheaper)
- 2 cups plain flour
- 4 teaspoons baking powder
- Icing sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease a 20cm round cake tin with butter
- Put syrup, water, raisins and butter in a saucepan, stir mixture over a medium heat until butter has completely melted
- Remove saucepan from heat and allow to cool
- Stir in vanilla essence
- Sift measured flour and baking powder into the saucepan, stir to combine
- Pour mixture (with assistance of spatula) into the cake tin
- Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes
To see if the cake is ready, stick a knife into the top of it (in an inconspicuous part of the cake) and take it out. If the knife has cake mixture stuck to it, the cake is not ready.
- Leave cake in tin for 10 minutes before turning it upside down onto a cooling rack
- Once the cake is cold, you can dust it with icing sugar
Store the cake in a cake tin or under a cover at room temperature. I put it in the refrigerator and it became firm overnight.
Recipe originally from Edmonds Cookery Book, 42nd Edition (1998)
The Retrospective Part
6th of October, 2011.
I wanted to get baking achievement points.
The baking process went fairly well. I followed a recipe from an Edmonds cookbook, and was able to fill in the gaps with simple internet searches (“How many mls in a cup of honey?”)
The recipe called for liquid honey, as well as dates. In place of the honey, I used some maple syrup sitting unused in the refrigerator mixed with some golden syrup. In place of dates, I used a couple of boxes of leftover snack raisins.
I took the photo before removing the cake from the tin, believing my job to be done. I was, however, mistaken.
This would be the last time I would line the cake tin with paper. It turned out that I had not used the correct greased paper, but sandwich wrap, which certainly explained why the cake stuck to the paper, leaving me without about three quarters of the total cake in an edible state.
The remainder of the cake, though, was delicious.
This is the first of the backlog of baking, or the bakelog if you will. I will eventually catch up with myself.