Cherry Cake

This isn’t what I had planned to be making today. I had wanted to make Scotch Bun, but I didn’t read the recipe in full until 5 minutes before I was going to make it. The recipe says it should be made weeks in advance it allow the flavour to develop! I wanted it for today to take to relatives! Then I though I’d make shortbread from the book, but the recipe says rice flour which I do not have! So this is what I made instead..

Ingredients

4 oz butter or margarine
8 oz self raising flour
Pinch of salt
4 oz sugar
4-6 oz glacé cherries quartered
1 egg
Half tsp vanilla
About 6 tbsps milk

Grease and line the base of an oblong loaf tin measuring 8.5 x 4.5 inches. Rub the fat into the flour and salt until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar and cherries. Make a well in the centre, pour in the egg, vanilla and some of the milk and gradually work in the dry ingredients, adding more milk if necessary to give a dropping consistency. Put into the tin, level the top and then bake at 180 for 75 minutes or until it’s well risen, golden and firm to the touch.

I thought this seemed like a long cooking time for a cake like this. I know it’s a fruit cake but it’s not really a lot of fruit but I did leave it in for the full time. It didn’t rise as much as I expected. It was smelling pretty good as it came out of the oven and it took a lot of will power not to cut into straight away and eat it warm! I was taking this to my gran for a New Years Day treat.

Once I did cut into after a bit of cooling I felt it was a bit crumbly..

Wasn’t sure if it was meant to be like that, or maybe it still was a touch warm when I was cutting it. The book gives a lot of advice on cake making faults; there’s too many to list them all but under the ‘Dry and crumbly header’, it’s says the fault can be too much baking powder or too long cooking in an oven that’s too cool. There was no baking powder in this so maybe I had left it in the oven too long after all. However I think the crumbliness was maybe due to not using enough milk and not judging my dropping consistency properly!

Despite it’s crumbly texture it is a good tasty cake. I put in 5oz of cherries but I think it could do with more so next time I would go for 6oz or maybe even more. It is lovely and light and one of those cakes that one slice is just not enough!!

Would I make this again? Yes, but would add more cherries and a touch more milk

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