Incoherent cake typology

[fivemack]

I know (as in, I am confident of baking and tend to get good results with) about three and a half cakes:

1. the Christmas cake where you glue together fruit with a batter made from equal parts butter, brown sugar, eggs and spiced plain flour (start by mixing butter and sugar; then add beaten eggs; then add flour) and totalling about the same weight as the fruit, then bake slowly for some hours


2. Chocolate brownies, where you melt together equal weights 'x' of dark chocolate and butter, beat together about 1.5x sugar and 0.75x egg, mix the two liquids, then add flour-or-ground-almond and raisins-or-walnuts-or-contrasting-chocolate-chips until the texture is right, and bake about gas mark four for about half an hour


3. Sponge cake / chocolate cake (this is the 1.5), where you mix (vigorously with an electric whisk) in a bowl equal weights of self-raising flour, soft butter, eggs and caster sugar, replacing a quarter of the flour with cocoa powder if you want a pale chocolate cake and half of the flour with cocoa powder if you want a dark chocolate cake, and bake roughly like the brownies

I expect there are quite a lot of other kinds of cake which are as different from these as a Christmas cake is from chocolate brownies ... a bit of Googling suggests some Swedish ones where the liquid is saffron-infused milk, and I remember making a lemon drizzle cake which involved more than adding lemons at the caster-sugar stage and making a lemony drizzling syrup.

So: people with a much wider knowledge of the space of tasty cakes - can you suggest a point as far as possible from the ones I've explored already, so I can go there and widen my knowledge? I'd like things which are definitely cake, rather than bread or biscuits.

Comments

[anne]

Italian olive-oil cakes!

[aldabra]

I vaguely remember from my youth a tea cake which wanted equal amounts (volumes?) of tea, sugar, flour, and some bran-based breakfast cereal which looked like dried caterpillars. Googling suggests it must have had butter in too. This probably isn't enough clues to reconstruct it.

I can lend you Red Chocolate Velvet Heartache, which is full of cake recipes with hidden vegetable ingredients. It looks superb, and I haven't had enough grip to cook anything out of it since I got it. (Cake not being one of the half dozen things K can be expected to eat when it is cooked.) "Ginger Sticky Toffee Pudding made with parsnip, or Orange Squash Cupcakes made with butternut squash are bound to amuse and delight your tastebuds." I'm sure you can retcon the secret ingredients out and the wheat back in...

[fivemack]

Ah yes, Red Chocolate Velvet Heartache is the one from which ghoti's amazing chocolate aubergine cake is made.

I've certainly encountered vegan cakes which begin by soaking a quantity of All-Bran (which I believe is your dried caterpillars) in orange juice, so will entirely believe a version with tea; in fact, I'm quite intrigued and might try it, with extra boozy raisins because in my experience few baked goods are spoiled by extra boozy raisins.

Sticky Parsnip Pudding sounds splendid, and I would probably not even take the parsnip out.

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I am not sufficiently good at replacing ingredients to turn the recipes in that book into wheat based non vegetable cakes, and experience suggests I am a lot better at it than Tom - , I'm also not sure why wheat is so much better than parsnips that I want to, and furthermore, have an excellent sticky toffee pudding recipe already.

OTOH, for years, the only cakes Judith would eat were from that book.

[fanf]

Sachertorte is fun - somewhere between chocolate cake and brownies. The recipe I have made a couple of times requires half a dozen eggs which are separated; the whites are whipped, and folded carefully into a mixture of melted chocolate, ground almonds, sugar, butter, and egg yolks (iirc). It is relatively complicated but very luxurious. Or you can buy one from Fitzbillies :-)

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

If you particularly want to try cake then I'd recommend finding a cake book, starting at the beginning and working your way through. I'd use Fast Cakes by Mary Berry, but it doesn't really matter what the book is. You could skip cakes that seem like not your thing, or what I do is simply feed the not-my-thing to other people (there always seems to be a mint-choc-chip thing, for example)

We've been talking about tea loaf a lot recently, I'm happy to give you my aunt's recipe which is the best I've ever had, and is as much like cake as brownies are. Battenburg is a bit more fiddly but fun. Meringue based cakes are easy and make you feel virtuous about using up the water from the chickpeas (although I vaguely remember that you don't use tinned chickpeas a lot, so the virtue is gone, leaving you with a kind of boring chocolate flavour thingummy).
Carrot cake? Coffee cake?
The sort that involves poking holes in the top and letting syrup sink in throguh the holes? (I think I have one of those with apricots in)

Cheesecake? Pastry based confections?

There must be lots more, but obviously I haven't baked for a while.

Lardy cake, whichI've been thinking of making lately because I wanted to see if I could make it vegetarian by using coconut oil (also I love it).
I already typed that up, so you might as well have that recipe here:

1lb plain flour
2 tsp salt
1/2oz fresh yeast/2tsp dried yeast (if you have a Tesco with a bakery, they give away fresh yeast)
1 tsp sugar
1/2 pint lukewarm water
10oz lard
4oz caster sugar
1oz currants
1oz sultanas
1tsp mixed spice
Milk for glaze.



Dissolve the tsp sugar in water, add the yeast and whisk. Leave in a warm place for ten minutes.

Add the sifted flour and salt to the yeast. Knead for ten minutes or until smooth.

Leave in a greased bowl covered with a tea towel until doubled in size (about two hours)

Roll dough into a rectangular shape about 1/2inch thick.

Dot with a third of the lard, sprinkle with a third of the sugar. Fold the dough over in thirds or roll loosely, turn around and roll again from the open end. Repeat. Cover with remaining lard, sugar, currants, sultanas and spice.

Roll the dough out to fit a greased 9" cake pan. Recover with the teatowel and leave to rise another 2 hours.

Brush with milk, bake in a hot oven for 20-25 minutes. Leave the cake in the tin for a few minutes before removing to cool completely.