Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!

Just a quick one today with a picture and recipe of my Simnel Cake. I have used this recipe from Nigella Lawsons “Feast” book a couple of times now. It is very yummy!

You can find some information about the origins of a Simnel cake here

Ingredients.

100g glacé cherries
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
500g mixed dried fruit
25g ground almonds
175g soft, unsalted butter
3 eggs
175g caster sugar
2 tablespoons milk
Zest of 1 lemon
1kg yellow marzipan to decorate
225g plain flour icing sugar for rolling
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon apricot jam, melted
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 egg white

Method

– Take everything you need out of the fridge. Preheat the oven to gas mark 3/170C. Butter and line the bottom and sides of a 20cm springform cake tin with a double layer of brown baking paper. Chop the cherries very finely and add them to the rest of the fruit.

– Cream the butter and sugar until very soft and light, and add the lemon zest. You could do this by hand, just with bowl and wooden spoon, but I own up to using my freestanding mixer here. But it’s not crucial, not least because the intention with fruit cakes is not to whip air into them. Measure the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and ground almonds into a bowl and stir to combine.

– Add 1 of the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar with 2 tablespoons of the dry flour-and-spice ingredients, then beat in the remaining eggs in the same way. Beat in the rest of the dry ingredients, and then the milk. Finally fold in the fruit.

– Dust a surface with a little icing sugar and then roll out about 400g of the marzipan. Cut it into a 23cm circle that will fit in the middle of the cake later. Spoon half of the fruit-cake mixture into the cake tin, smoothing it down with a rubber spatula, and then lay the marzipan circle on top of it. Spoon the rest of the mixture into the tin on top of the marzipan circle and smooth the top again. Bake for half an hour and then turn the oven down to gas mark 2/150C for another 1½ hours or until the cake has risen and is firm on top. Let it cool completely on a rack before you spring it open.

– Unspring the cooled fruit cake, and unwrap the lining from the cake. Roll out another 400g circle of marzipan, paint the top of the cake with the melted apricot jam, and then stick it on.

– Make 11 Apostle balls out of the remaining marzipan, roughly 2.5cm in size. Beat the egg white – just till it’s a bit frothy and loosened up a little, no more – and use that as glue to stick the Apostles around the edge of the cake.

– Now for the bit I love, but you can ignore altogether. Paint the whole of the cake with egg white, and then blow-torch the marzipan so that it scorches slightly, giving a beautifully burnished look.

Extracted from Feast: Food That Celebrates Life by Nigella Lawson. Published by Chatto & Windus at £17.99.
© Nigella Lawson 2004