No 20 - Sultana Cake

Sultana Cake

Mum was of the school of housekeeping which believed you should always have a selection of baked items in tins available to accompany morning and afternoon teas, whether for guests or for the menfolk working on the farm.

These days I cannot imagine anyone spending one day a week baking (at home) just to fill cake tins; not least because we are all encouraged to eat less sugar and butter and super-refined flour; and not to snack (or at least not snack on cake) between meals.

This sultana cake was one of Mum’s specialties; a slightly old-fashioned cake even then and somehow very ‘English’.  It suggested to me recipes from an age of employed cooks in country house kitchens with a very basic range of plentiful local ingredients, enhanced by carefully meted out stores of the exotic or hard to obtain; for us this was the sultanas.

I have no idea of the actual origin of the recipe, it probably came from Mum’s mother, and it was regarded as a luxury in our household; second only to Christmas cake.  It was treated as being expensive and we would get a severe telling off if, having come home from school to find no one indoors, we raided the cake tins and ate any sultana cake.  We weren’t encouraged to raid the cake tins – full stop – but sneaking bits of sultana cake was tantamount to a hanging offence.  It was probably the quantity of sultanas that go into it that stretched my mother’s delicately balanced household budget and made it the object of special status for us kids.  Sultanas were ‘off-limits’, kept on a top shelf, and only for use in special baked items and puddings.

Sultana Cake

½ lb butter

½ lb sugar

3 eggs

¾ lb flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 lb sultanas

Lemon essence (optional)

a sauce made of 1 heaped dsp of cornflour in a small cup of water – & cooled

Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, add sultanas and sift in flour and BP.  Finally add the gloop made of cooked cornflour and water.

Bake in a lined, greased 8” round tin, 170 C for 1¼ to 1½ hours.