I changed my mind at the last moment about the honey cake, as is a cook's prerogative. I'd been planning to try a Dan Lepard recipe for cinnamon honey fruit cake I downloaded from the Guardian website at some point since 3 May 2008, but when I spread open my folder (in the literal, old fashioned, lever-arch sense) of recipe clippings and looked at the list of ingredients, dried prunes and treacle began to feel rather heavy for a hot week in August. Instead, I switched to a honey cake recipe copied from the May 2008 edition of The English Garden. Cooking with honey must have been in the zeitgeist that month.
The English Garden recipe was a far plainer affair, made by the same method as ginger cake, by melting the butter with the sugar, and in this case honey rather than syrup or treacle. The proportions, if you fancy trying it for yourself, are 4 oz soft brown sugar, 5 oz butter, 6 oz honey and a tablespoon of water, to which once melted you add two eggs and 7 oz of self raising flour. Remembering past incidents where ginger cakes came out flecked with white patches of unmixed flour, I beat the flour more vigorously into the liquid ingredients than felt natural, having been brought up to believe you must fold the flour in lightly (using a metal spoon) and not over-beat the mixture or the cake would rise too much in the middle. The resulting mixture was more of a thick batter, and filled a small loaf tin. It was done after fifty minutes on the lowest shelf of the lower Aga oven on the hot side, and should have been cooked for an hour at 180 degrees C, if I'd had a cooker capable of that. Line the tin with baking parchment (having seen how runny the mixture is I'm glad I folded the paper and didn't cut it) and cool the cake in the tin.
Translating recipes from one stove to another is definitely an art rather than a science. The bottom of the lower hot oven in a four door Aga is theoretically at 180 C, but cakes and biscuits tend to cook in significantly less time than given in the recipes, on the other hand, a friend's flapjack recipe also supposed to be cooked at 180 degrees took a good five minutes longer than the time she gave.
The honey cake was nice, in a plain way, with a texture veering towards ginger cake. It did rise a little too much in the middle, and I did have to shave a few slivers off the top where it caught slightly, but it wasn't a bad cake for a first attempt. We agreed that next time round it could take some sultanas, to make it juicier and give some textural variety. Maybe Dan Lepard wasn't so far off the mark.
Today's experiment is from a Sophie Grigson recipe for American cherry pie clipped out of the Evening Standard. I failed to write down the date, but it's probably been in the file since my commuting days, at least fourteen years, without my ever having cooked it. In fact, in a spirit of curiosity I have just Googled Sophie Grigson Evening Standard, and see from her entry on her agent's website that she wrote their cookery column between 1986 and 1993, so I've had that yellowing piece of pink paper for over twenty years without ever having made use of it, until this morning.
It stipulated that if making your own shortcrust pastry, it should really be lard based, and as I rubbed the fat into the flour I realised it was years since I'd made shortcrust with lard. It handles differently to butter, and I was cautious in adding the water in case I overdid it and reduced the paste to slime, but the technique came back to me. The resulting pastry feels less oily to touch and not so prone to stretch when picked up than butter shortcrust, but easier to tear. Modern Western culture gives so little prestige to the knowledge that people have in their hands, as opposed to information that can be codified verbally, set out in checklists or tested via multiple choice questions. Is part of the appeal of The Great British Bake Off (not that I watch it myself) a reaction against the downgrading of craft skills?
Mind you, we haven't eaten the pie yet, and the pastry may be tough as old boots.
Addendum I mused also on the different roles that cherry and apple pie play in culture, apple pie linked with motherhood and a symbol of all that is wholesome and good. On the other hand the girl in the song Billy Boy can bake a cherry pie but is too young to leave her mother, while the implication lies heavy in the air that her wooer has slept with her regardless. The Cherry Tree Carol is pretty racy as well. Was it something about the juice, and the way the flesh is red all the way through, while apples are white and crisp within?
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