Easter Cake (or Simnel Cake)

I suppose this is really a Simnel Cake, but it never seems to get done in time, so is usually my family Easter Cake.   My mother always added the icing to an otherwise boring marzipan top, and the little eggs were either floating, sinking or rolling around, depending on how much of a hurry she was in at the time!   The recipe is not a standard one either, as it is the delicious Luncheon Plum Cake from my favourite Cordon Bleu Cookery (Hume and Downes), with a goodly slab of bought marzipan - sometimes cheating is necessary!

Easter Cake or Simnel Cake 

Easter Cake/Simnel Cake 

8oz/225g butter at room temperature

8oz/225g soft brown sugar

4 large eggs, beaten

12oz/350g plain flour

4oz/110g glacé cherries

8oz/225g raisins

8oz/225g sultanas

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp mixed spice

1 lemon, grated rind and juice

a little milk or cider

500g pack marzipan, egg white, 3oz/75g icing sugar, mini eggs, chickens

Preheat oven to 180 deg C, grease and line the base and sides of a 9” cake tin with non-stick baking parchment. 

Cream the butter and lemon rind, then add the sugar and beat until the mixture is light and (relatively!) fluffy.  Add the eggs, about 1/3 a time and continue beating, adding a couple of tablespoons of the flour so that the mixture doesn’t separate.   Divide the rest of the flour, mixing the fruit into one half, and the soda and spice to the other half.   

Stir in the fruit/flour mix, plus the lemon juice.  When this is all mixed in, add the soda/flour and enough milk or cider so that the uncooked cake will drop from the spoon.    Pour it into the tin and bake for about 1 ½ hours, turning the oven down to approx 160 deg C after the first hour.   If the cake looks as though it is getting too brown, protect the top with a piece of foil.  When it has cooked, remove from the tin and allow it to cool on a wire rack.  

Turn it over (as the cake invariably sinks a little) and brush the top with egg white.  Divide the marzipan in half.  Cut the first half into 11 and make little balls of marzipan.  Roll the second half to about 2cm/1" wider than the cake, and put onto the top.  Fold back the flappy edges and crimp to make a strong support for the little balls.  Brush with egg white and place the balls on the top, putting some egg white on them too.   Put under a grill until they have browned slightly.   When cool, mix up some icing sugar and water and pour into the middle section.   Judging it carefully, add chickens and eggs!