The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: Dundee cake

With Britain in lockdown (although quite frankly Allison and I were already working from home before the Prime Minister ordered the country into lockdown on Monday evening), our thoughts have turned to what we can do while we’re having to stay at home.

Quite a lot, as it happens. The kitchen in particular has been subject to a cleaning regime the likes of which it hasn’t seen since we moved in, and we’re growing plenty of things in the garden and even on a window-sill (more on these in later posts).

But first, some baking.

I’ve not made any bread for a while, although given the amount of flour we already had it’s only a matter of time.

Cakes, though? That’s another matter. In times of national crisis, there’s nothing like a nice cake to lift the mood, right?

We went through the cupboards to see what we had before deciding what sort of cake to make. Checking the cupboards can reveal some interesting things, especially if you’ve not done it for a while. We, it turns out, had a fairly random assortment of dried fruits (currants, raisins, etc) – items that had been bought on a one-off basis and sometimes left over from Allison’s cooking club.

Based on this, a fruitcake of sorts looked do-able so I consulted the oracle (a very well-used paperback version of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and came up with Dundee cake. This is an old family favourite (my grandma used to make it) and it’s called Dundee cake because it reputedly originated courtesy of Keiller’s, the Dundee-based marmalade producer which mass-produced the cake in the nineteenth century. As with most Delia Smith recipes, it’s online. 

The quantities of the various dried fruits in the recipe did not of course match what we had in the cupboard (we didn’t have any glace cherries, for example), but I reckoned that if we added up the total weight of all the dried fruits and then put in what we had up to that weight, it should be OK. On the recipe, currants, sultanas, glace cherries and mixed dried peel weigh in at 450g (more or less a pound in imperial), and we were able to get enough currants, sultanas, dried mixed fruit and raisins to get to that level (using up everything but the raisins, as it happens). 

We also didn’t have a small orange and a small lemon to zest, but we did have some large lemons in the fridge so I just zested that. Also, we didn’t quite have enough blanched almonds left to meet Delia’s requirement, but that’s just for decorating the top of the cake anyway (the trick is to put them on lightly and not press them down). So I went with a simple cross rather than arranging them in concentric circles. Although with the outer circle, it’s really a Celtic cross!

When making cakes I do get apprehensive about cooking times as the last thing I want is for it not to be done properly on the inside (the opposite of those foolish contestants on Masterchef who seem to think that they’re going to be the ones who can do the perfect chocolate fondant, which clearly started out as underdone chocolate cake). 

Only once the Dundee cake had cooled could I cut it open to check...

Thank goodness it was done in the middle! The result goes very well with a cup of tea in the afternoon.