Cake

Despite muttering about date cakes from time to time, it seems that I have not actually made one since the summer of 2013, noticed at reference 1. Since then, the dates have been displaced by dundees, that is to say Dundee cakes. This despite the fact that we can now, once again, buy brick dates for cooking, from Grape Tree.

But yesterday, in the intervals of baking the bread, thought to do a date cake, settling for the recipe in the ancient Whitworths recipe book.

In the event, I fell into my usual error of skim reading, rather than reading, with the first result that I creamed the butter into most of the flour and sugar, rather than just the sugar, with such subtleties being potentially destructive. In this case, the mixture was rather wetter than I was expecting, although it tasted fine. Second result that I did not work out that they meant for the cake to be cooked as a tray bake, rather than in a round cake tin. Which might have meant that the cake would be rather under cooked.

As it turned out, not a fluffy cake, with some sinking of the walnuts (just about visible in the snap above), but entirely acceptable. I think next time, if I remember, I will try the tray bake but cut down on the cooking.

PS: yet another quirk of aging memory was that I had no recollection of soaking the dates in hot water, despite it clearly having been an issue back in 2013. As far as I am concerned, a rather unusual proceeding which I would have thought that I would have remembered.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/more-cake.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/cake.html.