Further to the first post of 5th July, the cake came out of the tin OK, this being made a lot easier by it being a loose bottomed tin. Quite a shallow cake, maybe 2 inches deep in this 7 inch tin. Maybe two or three millimetres of brown outside, over the yellow crumb inside.
Left it to cool, stored it overnight and then tried it out yesterday evening.
The dried fruit and glacé cherries had not sunk to the bottom of the cake, such sinking being a common failing with such cakes. So far so good.
Quite a crumbly and quite a dry cake. Flavour quite good, not spoilt by it turning out that I had put twice as much grated orange rind in the mix as was specified in the recipe - a whole orange's worth rather than half an orange. Must try harder to read things, rather than to skim them. (In which connection, I have recently noticed a tendency to read a paragraph as a block, rather than reading it serially, one word after another. It seems reasonable enough that the brain, with its massively parallel processing, should do this, even if the subjective reading experience is not, in consequence, quite the same. Maybe what is happening here is that I have always been reading in blocks, but now the process is starting to break down so I notice).
I had used the Whitworth's recipe which, looking at other recipes, is a small cake - 6 ounces rather than 8 ounces of flour - cooked for a short time. Maybe a bigger cake, cooked at a lower temperature for a longer time would work better? Maybe a tin of water at the bottom of the oven, something that BH does for heavier fruit cakes, like Christmas cakes? Something which did not work at all well in the context of the much higher temperature bread baking, with the oven refusing to come to heat with all that water in it.
We will give the matter further consideration as we move on into the cake we have in hand now.
No comments:
Post a Comment