Then on Mid-Lent Sunday, instead of furmenty we eat Simnel cake: a cake made variously, but always with saffron for its principal ingredient. This I should fancy was a relic of Papistry, but I wonder how it originated. Lambert Simnel the imposter in Henry the Seventh’s time was a baker’s son, I think. The shop windows are filled with them, high and low eat them. (Elizabeth Gaskell, letter to Mary Howitt, 18th August 1838)
I’ve written more than once about making Hot Cross Buns for Good Friday and the Easter weekend. At this time of year I also make a simnel cake and, having never blogged about it before, thought it was about time I did so.
Simnel cake is a fruit cake, with two layers of marzipan (one within the cake and one on top) and 11 marzipan balls on top, to represent the 11 faithful disciples of Jesus: Judas who betrayed Christ gets no marzipan ball.
Elizabeth Gaskell, the writer of novels such as Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) that document the lives of workers in the industrial heartlands of the North of England, writes about the custom of eating simnel cake in a letter to a friend, Mary Howitt, in 1838. At the time Gaskell was living with her husband and children in Manchester, but in the letter she gives an account of the customs in Knutsford, the Cheshire town where she spent much of her childhood and where she met her husband, William, a Unitarian minister, a town that she would later immortalise in probably her best-known work, Cranford (1853) .
Gaskell notes that simnel cake is eaten on Mid-Lent Sunday (also known as Refreshment or Mothering Sunday) when it provides an alternative to furmenty – a much more basic dish somewhat like porridge and made with cracked wheat (and playing a starring role in literature, as it is arguably the dish that leads Thomas Hardy’s Michael Henchard to make a life-changing tragic error in The Mayor of Casterbridge).
Up until the 20th century the link between simnel cake and that middle Sunday in Lent was well-established, with it being traditional for girls in service to make a simnel cake to take home to their mothers on Mothering Sunday. However, nowadays simnel cake is more frequently associated with Easter itself, its rich flavours providing a welcome break after the discipline of Lent.
Although Gaskell suggests a possible link between simnel cake and Lambert Simnel (1477-1534), a claimant to the throne during Henry VII’s reign, references to simnel cake pre-date Lambert Simnel by around 200 years. It is more likely that the word ‘simnel’ comes from the Latin ‘similia’ meaning fine, wheat flour. Another tradition links the cake – and its name – to a couple, Simon and Nelly, who argued about how to make a cake, whether it should be boiled or baked and compromised by using both methods and the simnel cake was born (whilst there is no boiling in simnel cakes nowadays, I wonder if older versions boiled the dried fruit or made a boiled marzipan).
Gaskell identiifes ‘saffron’ – the expensive spice that imbues food with a gorgeous yellow-orange hue – as the cake’s principal ingredient. Recipes I consulted did not include saffron, but mixed spice is commonly used – so that was my spice of choice.
SIMNEL CAKE
Ingredients:
Cake:
225g softened unsalted butter
225g soft light brown sugar
4 large eggs
225g self-raising flour, sieved
225g raisins
100g currants
50g dried cranberries (or any other dried fruit you wish to use)
100g glace cherries, rinsed and quartered
Zest of 2 lemons
2 level teaspoons ground spice
Marzipan:
125g icing sugar
125g caster sugar
250g ground almonds
1 egg, lightly beaten
juice of half a lemon (approx)
OR
450g ready-made marzipan
2 tablespoons apricot jam
1 beaten egg
Method:
If you are making your own marzipan begin with that. Sieve the icing sugar into a medium-sized bowl. Then add the caster sugar and ground almonds and stir to mix. Add the beaten egg and enough lemon juice to bind the mixture together. Gather into a ball, wrap in clingfilm and place in the fridge until needed.
Line and grease a 20cm deep round cake tin.
Preheat the oven to 150C (13OC fan) or gas mark 2.
Beat together the sugar and butter in a large bowl until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding a spoonful of flour each time (so that the mixture doesn’t curdle).
Add in the remaining flour and mix together. Then add the fruit, zest and spice and stir thoroughly.
Place half the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and level the surface.
Roll out one third of the marzipan into a circle the same size as the cake tin, and place it on top of the cake mixture. Then spoon the remaining cake mixture into the tin on top of the marzipan and level the top.
Bake in the preheated oven for approximately 2 1/2 hours until golden, well-risen and firm to the touch.
Allow the cake to cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, then turn out of the tin and finish cooling on a cake rack.
When the cake is cold, warm the apricot jam in a small saucepan over a gentle heat until it gets runny. Brush the apricot jam over the top of the cake.
Roll out another third of the marzipan to a round the size of the cake and place on top, pressing down gently so that it sticks.
Divide the remaining marzipan into 11 and roll each one into a ball. Brush the marzipan top of the cake with beaten egg and stick the 11 balls at equal distance around the perimeter of the cake. Brush the balls with beaten egg. Place the cake under a hot grill for a few minutes until the marzipan turns golden-brown.
