Simnel Sunday

On Easter Sunday part two of Easter Baking Project commenced with the preparation of that Easter classic the Simnel Cake. As always I did the two most important things first; one choose the appropriate music to cook to and two grease my cake tin with margarine and a bit of flour. This time round I stacked up Black Sabbath's second, third, fourth and fifth albums to listen to on the CD player and greased a 20.5cm round cake tin with margarine and then sprinkled the inside with flour.

I put six ounces of brown sugar and six ounces of margarine into a bowl and then creamed them thoroughly until they were fluffy. I then gradually added three eggs and four and a half ounces of self-raising flour into the mix while stirring them hard with a wooden spoon until my right arm felt like it had more muscles in it than before.

I next dropped in a teaspoon of nutmeg, two tablespoons of golden syrup and five tablespoons of semi-skimmed milk into the bowl and mixed them in until they vanished into the rest of the ingredients. I next got two hundred grams of mixed peel, five hundred grams of sultanas and a further four and a half ounces of flour and dropped them into the bowl. I then stirred them into the rest of the mixture and did not let up until all the flour had disappeared and there was no loose fruit showing. I finished things off by squirting in two teaspoons worth of almond essence.

I then took some ready-made marzipan and rolled out a slice big enough to cover the bottom of my cake tin. I poured half the fruit mixture into the tin and then put the marzipan on top of it. Following this I buried the marzipan with the rest of the mixture atop of it. I got the oven ready meanwhile by pre-heating it to 170 degrees (180 for non-fanned ovens) and cooked the cake mix on this temperature for an hour. I then turned the oven down to 130 degrees (140 for non- fanned ovens) and cooked the cake for another hour until it started to burn a little at the edges. After this I took it out of the oven, left it on the side to cool and had an early night.

The next morning once the cake had cooled I spread plum jam over the top of it and covered the top with marzipan and the jam acted as glue to keep the marzipan topping in place. I used the spare marzipan to create a pattern on the top as you can see in the pictures.

The Simnel cake is, perhaps appropriately, the Ben Hur of cakes in that it is an epic that takes a while to make and take in. However the taste is worth it with the two types of marzipan; one on top of the cake and one melted inside of this making it one of the best cakes there is.