History Bakers: Seed Cake (The Great British Bake Off - Week 1 – Cakes)

To tie in with the Great British Bake Off this year, staff at the History Centre have decided to gather historic recipes and try them out. With cake kicking things off on the show this series, we thought we’d start there so here is one of our recipes for cake:

Recipe for 'Seed Cake' [U DDSY3/10/6, pp.18-19]

The recipe comes from a transcript of a 17th century recipe book, which can be found within the Sykes Family collection [U DDSY]. The transcript was created during the early 20th century whilst Sir Mark Sykes was head of the family. Unfortunately, the actual recipe book does not appear to have survived but the transcript captures the 17th century spelling and style of the original.

I chose this recipe because I love unusual flavourings, such as cardamom, and wanted to see how caraway matched up. Additionally, it’s a straightforward 1:1:1 cake recipe so I thought I couldn’t go too wrong with it. This was particularly important because I decided to try making the cake gluten free and coeliac friendly (we like to make sure everyone can take part), so having the equal ratios would make substituting gluten free flours slightly easier. 

On that note, I chose to use a shop bought gluten free self-raising flour and added almond flour to improve the moisture content and texture of the finished cake. Using shop bought gluten free flour alone can lead to gritty and slightly dry cakes. I also chose to use less eggs than the recipe suggests. This was to adjust for the added raising agents in the shop bought flour and the higher moisture content of the almond flour as compared to wheat flour.

As you can see from the image at the beginning of this post, the original recipe gives exact ingredient amounts along with a clear method. Once I had my gluten free adjustments sorted, there was little for me to do but to start measuring and follow the recipe. In case you want to have a go yourself, the following outlines the ingredients as stated in the recipe and shows how these were translated to metric quantities and adjusted for gluten free baking.

Original ingredients:

• 1 pound butter
• 1 pound flour
• 1 pound sugar
• 2 ounces caraway seeds
• 10 eggs plus 5 whites

Adjusted to be coeliac friendly:

• 450g butter (I only had salted but might have chosen unsalted if had the option)
• 100g ground almonds plus 354g gluten free self-raising flour (I used Doves Freee)
• 454g caster sugar
• 57g caraway seeds
• 6 eggs plus 140ml whole milk

Getting the oven temperature correct required a bit of guesswork, but a quick reference to the baking times and temperatures for a basic cake mix helped there. I decided to split the quantity of batter across two loaf tins, as this recipe makes a lot of batter, and I didn’t want to have the oven going for two hours! I’ve outlined the method I used below, which adds a bit more detail to the original recipe:

1. Heat oven to 170°C (guessed at this temperature based on a standard equal quantities cake recipe, such as you might find in the good old Bero book!)
2. Line two loaf tins with greaseproof paper (probably should have greased them if I was being completely authentic but I didn’t think until it was too late!)
3. Cream butter in a large bowl (using a wooden spoon, I didn’t cheat by using an electric hand mixer although I really wanted to!)
4. Beat eggs into butter (used a hand whisk, really wanted to use that electric hand mixer!)
5. In a separate bowl, mix sugar, flour and caraway seeds together
6. Add dry ingredients to the butter and eggs a bit at a time until well combined (at this stage my mix was a bit dry so I added 140ml milk)
7. Pour into two loaf tins (at this point I went a bit maverick and sprinkled some brown sugar over the top to give the cake to give it a crisp and crunchy top) 
8. Bake in the oven for 1 hour (my oven runs on the hot side and the cake came out a darker golden than expected, so 50 minutes might have done it)

Apologies to all, but I forgot to take photographs during the baking process. However, I was really pleased with how it turned out, and I’ve now added caraway seeds to my baking cupboard staples! 

The finished cake - with a bit missing because it got stuck on the tin!

Here’s what our staff taste testers thought – I particularly enjoyed ‘Spiffing!’ as a comment, not a word you hear very often anymore:

• Delicious! Very light and moist with a delicate hint of caraway
• Yummy – light & fluffy – lovely taste of caraway
• Really tasty – unique flavour – thank you
• Thoroughly enjoyable, just the right amount of sweetness and a nice spongy texture
• Super yummy, really fluffy & light
• Spiffing!
• Wouldn’t know its gluten free, smells like cake and the caraway is nice
• Liked it enough that I have copied recipe to bake at home!
• So soft and fluffy and a lovely rich caraway flavour

Why not have a go yourself and let us know how you get on via the History Centre’s social media channels…