This month’s recipe is Earl Grey Tea Loaf.
I’ll say this right now. This is not a cake for me. There is far too much dried fruit in here and it’s not covered in buttercream.
So what do I do with cakes that aren’t my thing? That’s right – take them home to my mum and Dad who like stuff with dried fruit in a lot more than I do.
I actually made this at home because my mum has a variety of dried fruit as well as Earl Grey tea which, as a non tea drinker, I don’t have. She also has Golden Caster Sugar which I can never ever find in the supermarket!
Saying that, unfortunately she didn’t have quite enough raisins to make the quantity required so I had to top it up with sultanas. Makes no difference to me – I don’t like any of them.
I made the tea (which smelt incredibly strong) and left the fruit to soak in it overnight. Mmmmm doesn’t it look lovely? (no)
I went back the next day to finish the cake. I mixed the egg, flour and juice and zest of one lemon into the mix and put it in the tin and into the oven.
The recipe says ‘pour’ the mixture into the tin. I don’t know who wrote this but, my friends, ‘pour’ is not the word. There’s no pouring here, it’s too thick for that.
I put it into the oven for 30 minutes and then went to check on it. I turned it, left it for another 30 minutes and checked it, but it still wasn’t cooked. I left it for another five minutes and it seemed fine, but quite burnt to be honest. I probably should have put some foil over it or something but hey, you live and learn.
The recipe says to use Earl Grey tea to make the icing. I don’t know if that means boil a pot of tea and use some of the liquid to mix together the icing or put tea leaves in it, but I think this cake has far too much tea in it anyway so I skipped that step and just made regular icing.
The recipe also says you can top the cake with chocolate shavings of your choice. My parents were a little perplexed about why you’d put chocolate on a tea loaf. Apparently on day one you eat a tea loaf like a cake and from day two onwards you eat it like a loaf and put butter on it, and therefore it would be a bit odd to have chocolate on it. Whatever, I went for it anyway, mainly to disguise the burnt top (it didn’t work).
Here’s the finished product:
This is a dense cake. If you baked several thousand of these you could build a very sturdy house.
On to the reviews:
“That’s alright,” said my dad. He later expanded and said it was a ‘winner’.
“Um, well, it’s chewier than I thought,” said my mum.
There’s a note on the calendar which says “you can make this delicious low-fat cake with other teas; try Lady Grey, Lapsang, Souchong, passion flower, your favourite black tea or green tea… experiment!” To which I say: no thank you.
Also, ‘delicious’ and ‘low fat’ are not words that belong next to each other.
Along with the sweetcorn loaf, let’s file this under ‘we’ll never speak of this again’.