It's been two weeks since my Nan got out of hospital after having an operation on her knee and I still haven't been to visit her. So what better way is there to offload some guilt than by making a cake?
The last time we had a knitting session, I remember her telling me about this carraway seed cake she used to make and how lovely it would be if I could make one for her. So this morning, frantically searching my cupboards for my jar of carraway seeds, it occurs to me that I had taken the jar to my boyfriends house after promising his mad uncle to make him a carraway seed cake. This begs the question - What is it with old fogeys and seed cake?
The graph starts at a peak because when you're a baby, you'll obviously eat anything your given, especially if it's got sugar in it. As we move down to number two, around the teenage years, you suddenly realise that it's not cool to eat cakes that your grandparents like. This further decreases at number three, in your twenties and thirties, when you're too busy buying Flavour Shakers and sipping americanos in Starbucks. Besides, you've just spent 45 minutes doing the advanced spin class and couldn't bare to think about how many calories would be in a slice of cake! This attitude carries on until early retirement when the likelihood of caraway seed cake taking your fancy increases exponentially after coming to accept that you haven't got many years left and would like to re-invoke some childhood memories.
But seeing as I don't have the main ingredient, it looks like I'm going to have to make something else.I remember the day I discovered a rosemary bush in my neighbours garden. It was a revelation. I spent the whole day making rosemary roast potatoes, rosemary with lamb, rosemary infused oil, rosemary sugar and of course, rosemary cake. Because of its herby-savouriness, rosemary cake is the closest thing I can think of to resemble caraway seed cake and why I'm going to make it instead. The recipe comes from Domestic Goddess. I promise to use a recipe from a different book next time!
Ingredients
250g unsalted butter
200g golden caster sugar
3 large eggs
210g self raising flour
90g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
needles from a 10cm stalk of rosemary, chopped small but not too fine
4 tbsp milk
1-2 tbsp rosemary sugar or golden caster sugar
Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour with each egg. Now add the vanilla. Fold in the rest of the flour. Thin the batter with the milk until you get a smooth dropping consistency and scrape into a lined loaf tin. Sprinkle the rosemary sugar or golden caster sugar on top before you put into the preheated oven. Cook for an hour or until a tester comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack then wrap in foil until you want to eat it.
