honey tea loaf

Today, I tried to make honey tea loaf, a tea cake, something more ambitious than my previous plain but oversweet sponge cake.

We’d decided spontaneously we wanted to make something without too much sugar. That’s not so easy to find, it turns out: most recipes require substantial quantities of the hyper powder. Well, my chosen BBC recipe calls for honey instead, and only a little of it. Great, I thought!

Last time round, I’d realised, too late, that our cake tins are far too big for standard BBC recipes, so this time I decided to double the recipe quantities. That was good in that the baking tin was now properly filled, but it caused an ingredient problem: the recipe called for twice as much dried fruit as we had to hand. I substituted unsalted roasted peanuts for the missing fruit, and that was a mistake: the tea cake came out a little dry.

The recipe calls for mixed spices, so I used garam masala. That really made it work. The flavour was gorgeous, we both really liked it. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to try munching some slices with butter and Munster, and see what happens.