Baking Powder Tins

That's a dessertspoon by the way

These are old baking powder tins. They're from the days when such containers were metal (not plastic) and the lids went over the top - not  inside it.  My grandmothers and my mother used to save them to steam a species of fruit loaf.

I’m not sure whether it was the dense loaf itself, the butter, or the novelty of it being round,  but I remember the childish me loving the buttered round slices of loaf with cups of hot tea. 

The tins came to light the other day while I was dredging around for preserving jars (for beetroot) and I mused over them for a while and recalled all the experimenting I did while living on yachts to try and make bread and cakes in a pressure cooker.  I must have been trying to reinvent the wheel because I had clearly forgotten that my pioneering forbears had ‘made do’ without bakers ovens for years and had been sufficiently inventive to create perfectly acceptable cakes and bread using steam.

I don’t have the specific recipe for the loaf that my memory conjures now that I look at the tins (if indeed there was only one), so I am going to experiment with oven bake tea loaf recipes that I do have.  I recall that such loaf recipes were rather plain affairs, very little leavening (soda), no egg, dry, hard, fruit soaked overnight in cold tea, and just a pinch of precious spices – and they came out dense and moist, a bit like slicing cheddar cheese….

Did dried fruit used to be drier?  I recall that dates used to come in blocks like building bricks, and sultanas were hard little nuggets.  Maybe that was just the effect of the extra distance travelled to NZ.  Anyway, soaking fruit used to be essential, but I am worried that soaking the softer, oiled, dry(ish) fruit  that we get nowadays might be overdoing it.

Watch this space…..