Friday cake (2)

I was lucky enough to be drawn for cake again last Friday, meaning that it was my turn to make cake for all my lucky colleagues today. Feeling that I didn't really do very well last time I was drawn, in terms of making a British cake, I thought I would try a little harder this time. This time, however, I was armed with knowledge of a source of British flour (Doves farm, as mentioned a little while ago), so I set out to think of a type of cake that I would be likely to be able to make from all British ingredients. In the end, at the suggestion of one of my colleagues, I went for a 'honey cake'. I've never made a honey cake before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect, however a quick search on the Internet revealed a few good sounding recipes.

Being a honey cake, one of the main ingredients is honey. And, of course, no cake would be a cake without a good quantity of sugar. The recipe called for light Muscavado sugar. Now, I didn't think I'd have much chance of finding British Muscavado sugar, since it is, I believe, always made from sugar cane. However, it turns out that 'Silver Spoon' sugar is made using sugar beat grown in Britain. In fact, according to the 'Silver Spoon' website, they process the entire sugar beat crop! Gosh. Unfortunately, it turned out that my local supermarket isn't one of the suppliers of Silver Spoon sugar, so that could be why I haven't so far noticed that you can indeed by British sugar. So, I headed to Tesco, who do apparently sell this brand of sugar.

After getting the bus all the way into town to go to Tesco, I find that although they clearly do sell Silver Spoon sugar, they had run out. I tried to get some of the other ingredients, but found that they had no British honey and didn't have the self-raising variety of Doves farm flour. So, I headed back to my local supermarket, Sainsbury's, where I was able to get Scottish Heather Honey and the self-raising flour. In the end, I settled for light Muscavado sugar, made from sugar cane. So, the cake wasn't made entirely of British ingredients in the end, but it was certainly a lot closer then last time!

I thought the cake was quite nice, but we shall have to see if any of my colleagues comment on it! I shall have to do a little more research on the sugar and see if I can find a reliable source of Silver Spoon sugar.