This series is starting to sound like a fairly dull and inordinately food-focused episode of Friends.
Anyway, this loaf cake is technically a cake, I think, but more like a sweet cinnamon bread. We call it breakfast bread because, wait for it; it tastes amazing for breakfast – either freshly baked and warm with butter melting on top, or sliced and toasted and warm with butter melting on top.
Or at any other point in the day, with butter melting on top.
And it’s delicious and easy and coincidentally, nut and egg and dairy-free (less dairy-free if you smother it in butter, as I highly recommend), so very suitable for a whole range of audiences. I also appreciate the colour of the cake, the hue of a healthful wholemeal bread, so that once sliced and in a lunchbox I look like an extremely virtuous mother, but with the bonus that it actually gets eaten and enjoyed.
Enough! This is what I’m talking about:
Definitely loaf cake shaped… and no yeast – but, nevertheless, delightfully bread-like:
What would Paul make of it?
This photo is in my media library now and I have a feeling it may feature regularly
I’m confident he’d be thrilled.
This is a recipe adapted from one that my mum used to make for us when we were little and living in Norway and I think she had been given the recipe by a friend from Holland. All that to say, this is a loose interpretation of some kind of Dutch breakfast bread. I’ve never been to the Netherlands though – not unless you count a fleeting and slightly humiliating university trip to Amsterdam – so I can’t vouch for any kind of authenticity. I can, however, vouch for how tasty it is (very) and how many slices I can eat in one morning (lots).
The recipe is – as are all recipes I make more than once – exceptionally simple!
Ingredients
450g self raising flour
200g soft brown sugar
250g golden syrup / corn syrup / honey
250ml water
1tsp vanilla essence
1tsp ground ginger
2tsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of cloves
Pinch of salt
Method
Mix the dry ingredients.
Mix the syrup and vanilla with water, then add to flour mix.
Mix thoroughly.
Grease and line loaf tin.
Place into a cold oven. Set to 170C / 330F.
Bake for 60-70minutes, ish, or until skewer comes out clean. If it looks like the top may overly brown then throw some foil over the top halfway through.
This time I dusted some icing sugar over the top to convince my 3 year old who was suspicious of a cake that didn’t involve chocolate. It worked! But I would probably leave it off next time to keep things simple.
Cool, slice, cover in butter. Eat too many slices in a frenzy at the kitchen counter and the rest buttered and wrapped in foil for ideal daytrip sustenance.
Picnic spot of choice
Looking back on the loaf cake series: the orange one, and the easy one.
tMatM x