Like Christmas, Easter provides the keen cook with the opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen. There’s the traditional dinner of roast lamb – the springtime counterpart to the roast turkey Christmas dinner.
And when it comes to baking, Easter offers its own slightly lighter variants of Christmas delights, which stlll contain many of the same ingredients, specifically dried fruit, nuts and marzipan. Instead of the heavy fruited Christmas cake there’s the simnel cake, which can be made at the last minute, dispenses with the icing and makes a real feature of the marzipan. And the dense alcohol-rich fruited filling of the mince pie gives way to the lightly fruited and spiced hot cross bun. Continue reading “Easter baking”
Tag: Easter
Simnel Cake
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) Continue reading “Simnel Cake”
Hot Cross Buns
One of the things I love about food is the way that different foods mark out the year, its changing seasons and its various festivals. I particularly love cooking at Christmas and Easter, partly because many of the things i make on these occasions are once a year treats: the rarity of mince pies, Christmas cake and simnel cake makes both the making and eating of them all the more exciting. Continue reading “Hot Cross Buns”