Six minute Apple Tea Cake

Apple Tea Cake

A wet weekend provided the perfect setting to bake a classic apple tea cake, something I've been meaning to make for quite a while. This is a cake that can be made very quickly, 6 minutes in fact, popped in the oven for 25 minutes and be ready to take over to a friend's house for morning tea, still warm out of the oven.

I was searching through my Mum's old recipe books looking for her tea cake recipe, such a treasure house of memories in those books,  and to my delight I found this one.  It was given to her by Chris, who is a good friend of mine, and who we used to visit for a cuppa sometimes when Mum would come up to stay. My  Mum would also love looking at and discussing Chris's tropical orchids and enjoy giving them some extra tlc. I suppose this copy of the recipe could be about 15 years old now, and it cooked up beautifully. Tea cakes are meant to be eaten straight away whilst still warm, and have a reputation for not being as fresh the following day however this one did. I can also remember sitting with my great Aunts and eating tea cake and being offered butter to spread on it, which we did with no guilt at all. Those were the days. Nostalgia is a wonderful thing.

Finding this recipe also made me think how we rarely write out recipes to pass onto friends now.  We either send them the link to where we found it on the computer, for example on a blog, or scan the recipe out of the recipe book we own, or I suppose sometimes if we can remember it we tell them how it is made and they might write it out there and then. A couple of my friends still give me the original copy of a recipe from where they found it in a magazine or a newspaper if they no longer want it. I have a drawer full of those waiting to be tried, however I still have lots of hand written recipes in folders which I have been given over the years and which are favourites. I will always keep those, however inevitably some of them will appear on my blog for easy access. There are so many memories and so much history embedded in food and recipes, don't you think?

Ingredients:

1/4 cup milk
2 eggs
1 cup S.R. Flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 lb or 125g butter
1 tablespoon plain flour

Optional topping:

sliced apple, cinnamon, sugar as topping




Method:

Beat all ingredients together for 6 minutes.
Decorate with apple, cinnamon and sugar before placing in the oven.
Bake in a moderate oven for about 1/2 hour, until the top looks cooked. My cake needed about 40 minutes but my oven isn't as hot as some.

Warm wishes

Pauline