#43: Cake

The height of indulgence

The peculiar appeal of cake

I wonder if cakes were originally a way of preserving and packing high-calorie food like fat, sugar and dried fruit together to see us through the winter, and have since become an afternoon treat and sign of hospitality. In Jane Austen’s Emma the heroine’s father denies their guests Mrs Goddard and Miss Bates rich food because of his concern for the digestion, so she makes ‘the two ladies all the amends in her power, by helping them to large slices of cake and full glasses of wine, for whatever unwilling self-denial his care of their constitution might have obliged them to practise during the meal.’

Cake also goes naturally with museum and gallery trips, at once a delightful symbol of afternoon leisure and a calorific compensation for the peculiar tiredness induced by the stop-start museum wander.

Cakes without flour, sugar and butter?

I shouldn’t really eat traditional cake, since I’m trying to follow a paleo or caveman diet, which excludes flour, sugar and butter. The cakes I most miss are scones – the rough dense texture of the scone, the smooth blandness of the cream and a shot of sugary jam on top. Also Eccles cakes – clumped currants in an irregular crumbly puff pastry case. ‘O my buttons!’ As Tom Tulliver says in The Mill on the Floss on learning that there is apricot roll-up for tea.

My current/currant favourite cake recipes

So I was pleased to come across some paleo cake recipes on Elana’s Pantry. These use coconut or almond flour, and honey instead of sugar. My two favourites at the moment are carrot cake and chocolate cake. They have a slightly different consistency – not as crumbly – but are just as light and delicious.

quote from Emma by Jane Austen (Penguin, 1985), p.223