Foods II- Baking

Ingredients

12 oz plain flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice
A pinch of salt
4 oz candied peel
4 oz cherries
2 lb dried fruits
4 oz blanched almonds
4 eggs
4 tbsp sherry
Finely grated 1 lemon
8 oz margarine
8 oz sugar
1 tbsp black treacle

Method

Sieve together all the dry ingredients.
Mix the peel, fruit, cherries, chopped almonds and lemon rind.
Whisk the eggs and sherry together.
Beat the margarine, sugar and black treacle until soft.
Add the flour and egg mixtures alternately to the margarine little by little, till it has a thick paste consistency.
Stir in the fruit mixture.
Put into an 8-9 inch tin, lined with greaseproof paper round the sides and at the bottom.
Now, tie a double band of brown paper round the outside of the rim, standing well up above the top of it.
Put in the middle of a hot oven.
Bake for 3 1/4-3 1/2 hours
Keep the gas mark 3 for the first 1 1/2 hours, and then decrease to gas mark 2 for the remainder.
Cool the cake in the tin, then store in an airtight container.




What you will need

•2 3/4 cups (about 650 ml) of warm water
•Some flour (about 8 cups, though it varies). Regular, unbleached white flour works well. Whole wheat flour rises slowly, due to the lack of gluten, but a mix of 1/2 whole wheat and 1/2 white flour gives good results.
•Two packets of dried yeast.
•Three tablespoons (about 45 ml) of sugar or malt extract
•A bit less than a tablespoon (about 10 ml) of salt (optional)
•Shortening--butter, oil, lard, anything that's greasy and edible
•A big bowl
•Two bread loaf pans
•A big horizontal surface--a countertop works well
•Paper towels
•A spoon and a knife
•An oven
•A rack of some sort, or just the top of the stove
•Some butter for later
Procedure

Mix the water and sugar and, if desired, salt in the big bowl. Add the yeast. Go post a couple of messages to K5. When you come back, the yeast should have grown to form a stinky scum on the water.

Add flour and stir. At first, it will look like clumps of flour in liquid. Keep stirring and add more flour. Eventually, it will become a sticky, spongy mass.

Dump some flour liberally on your countertop or other horizontal surface. Remove the sticky mass with your hands and plop it onto the flour. Sprinkle flour over the top.

Now comes the part that puts many people off: kneading. For some, this is too much like work. Yet it's a satisfying kind of work. You can imagine it's the face of somebody you don't like. For each step of kneading, push down on the dough with the heels of your hands and spread it out. Then turn it over, sprinkle with flour, and fold it in half. True hackers will recognize that this uses the power of exponentiation; every iteration multiplies the number of layers by two. Twenty times, for about a million layers, is about right. Stop kneading when it stops sticking when you fold it over.