Adventures in Procrastinatory Baking

[rikibeth]

I have just about convinced myself that I really DO need to acquire some Madeira and bake a seed-cake, for the rather flimsy reason that my characters (Horatio Hornblower, Archie Kennedy, and Lady Clarke, who is Archie's Aunt Sophia -- I invented HER, at least) are partaking of that right now. Baking seed-cake is probably easier than writing.

So: do

Comments

[eglantine_br]

Seed Cske? I need to look that up. It is also mentioned in 'Busman's Honeymoon.' Little Harriet Vane ate it as a child.

[rikibeth]

I think the first place I ran into it was in The Hobbit. The dwarves were very happy to demand Bilbo's seed-cake, regardless of whether he'd offered it!

It seems to be a yeasted coffee-cake-like object, with caraway seeds. I've got to try it.

[starcat_jewel]

You had me until you mentioned caraway seeds. :-)

OTOH, that got me curious, and I Googled for recipes. Found several, including one from a snotty twerp who insisted that if you tweak it at all, then you CAN'T call it seed cake because it's something else (which reminded me of someone who once insisted that pizza with anything on it but mozzarella, tomato sauce, and a short list of about 4 other ingredients was Not Pizza At All, but "exotic bread food"). But I also found this one, which suggests that any sort of strongly-flavored seed will do. I can imagine this with cardamom seed -- yum!

[rikibeth]

The authors of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, who have done PAINSTAKING research, state very firmly that the recipes varied greatly between sources, and Hannah Glasse even suggests leaving out the seeds entirely. The one in Lobscouse calls for caraway, optional cardamom, AND optional coriander, as well as spices, but I intend to make it just with caraway and the spices, because I bit down on a whole cardamom pod today in my leftover mushroom mattar and I have had quite enough cardamom for the week, thank you. I like cardamom (it's one of the things that make the blueberry muffins at Sound Bites purely magical, and essential to Danish dough) but I do find that a little goes a long way.

[deguspice]

I was about to mention the Spotted Dog. I haven't read the books, so I don't remember where I heard about it (probably on NPR).

[rikibeth]

I have owned a copy for quite a few years, now. I couldn't remember whether it addressed seed-cake, but it does, which saves me a great deal of adaptation work.

[charliecochrane]

Someone (possibly me but possibly not) wrote about someone (Jonty? Archie? Horatio?) eating carraway cake and the seeds going everywhere like a demented parrot.

[rikibeth]

I suppose if you garnish it with seeds or comfits as well as baking them into the middle, it would do that, rather the way the poppy seeds from a poppyseed bagel do! I don't know if I'm sufficiently motivated to mess around making the suggested comfits, although I suppose I could do that while the dough is rising.

Demented parrot sounds rather like Jonty, who gets crumbs everywhere, but it could be any of them, really. I think I will be nice to Horatio and not have him muss the clean shirt he's only JUST put on!

[anteros_lmc]

It was you and it was Jonty :) Though don't ask me which book!

[anteros_lmc]

I first came across seed cake in the Famous Five books when I was a kid. I was terribly disappointed when I finally got to try some, it was dry and gravelly! I'm sure yours will be lovely though. Post pics! :)

[eglantine_br]

Isn't it funny how foods go with or come from books? Not recipe books-- i mean books where you read about a food and then want it, or foods that seem to go with certain books...

I remember once hearing an interview with Maya Angelou, who said that as a child she had paired dry toast with Macbeth. She said they went together.

Some seed cake recipes say you can use anise. That sounds nice to me. And it can go with poppy seeds too-- as they are sort of mild alone.

[rikibeth]

I actually loathe anise and like caraway, so I'm going with the caraway. I like poppyseed too, but if I were making this cake with poppyseeds, I wouldn't want to use them plain, I'd want to use the sweet poppyseed filling that I know as mun, and that'd turn the cake Hungarian or Polish or similar areas instead of English, and it wouldn't be their seed-cake at all.

I have always been a one for seeking out foods because I read about them in stories. Clearly, I'm not the only one, or Lobscouse and Spotted Dog and The Little House Cookbook -- both of which I own, of course -- wouldn't exist.

[eglantine_br]

Is mun the stuff in hammentashen? Delicious. and no, not their kind of thing at all.

I like carroway too.

[rikibeth]

Yup, that's the stuff. If you've never had it in the middle of a sour cream coffee cake, you are missing a treat!

[kittenmommy]

LOL, the things we do for fanfic, right??

I hope your seed cake turns out delicious! :D

[rikibeth]

It's rising now. ;-)

[kittenmommy]

OM NOM NOM!

[rikibeth]

It's an experiment! I think the last time I had this cookbook out, I was making jam roly-poly. I do not remember WHY it suddenly became imperative to have jam roly-poly, although my memory says that I was teased into it rather strongly. eternaleponine says jam roly-poly was the only thing from the book for which we had all the ingredients in the house, but is as mystified as I am on why we had to have something from it at all. Custard sauce was also involved, as were allusions to The Tale Of Tom Kitten, since he nearly got cooked into the middle of a jam roly-poly, if you recall.