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Cornish Great Cake

Cornish Great Cake is a traditional English recipe (originating in Cornwall) for classic fruit cake from the 1760s that uses beaten egg whites and creamed butter and sugar as leavening agents. The full recipe is presented here and I hope you enjoy this classic English version of: Cornish Great Cake.

prep time

30 minutes

cook time

155 minutes

Total Time:

185 minutes

Serves:

8–10

Rating:

Tags : Vegetarian RecipesBaking RecipesCake RecipesBritish RecipesEnglish RecipesCornish Recipes

The original recipe here comes from 1763 and was, literally for a ginormous cake, starting with 2.25kg (5 lbs) of butter! This version has been cut down 10-fold from the original! So, it would have been a massive cake probably baked at the local bakers after the bread for the day was cooked and as the baker's oven was cooling down. Now, the original recipe was little more than a list of ingredients, with no real instructions as to how to prepare the cake. There's no leavening agent as such; however we now know that creaming together butter and sugar traps micro bubbles in the creamed mixture that expand on baking, so that's one source of leavening. Beaten eggs whites also trap air bubbles in the protein matrix of the beaten mixture, so that's another source of leavening. Anyone who's prepared a rich fruit cake will know how that's put together, so we can use this information to put the cake together.

The 'perfume' referred to in the recipe could be almost anything, though I reckon from the cake's age that it might be ambergris. You could substitute with vanilla, though I've gone for rose water in this case. The original recipe called for 2/6d (two shillings and sixpence worth of perfume [not cheap] which is why I think it refers to ambergris) but I have substituted 2 tbsp of orange flower water. The Canary referred to here is also known as sack, a sweet fortified wine from the Canaries. Madeira or Cypriot Commandaria St John would be the modern equivalents. The recipe also calls for citron, the candied peel of Citrus medica a citrus whose fruit looks like a huge, rough, lemon. I have a source of citron for making candied peel, but if you can't get it substitute chopped mixed peel.

Also note that white sugar wouldn't really be known at the time and people were still using grated loaf sugar. A compromise between ease of preparation and authenticity would be the use of golden caster sugar

Ingredients:

225g (8 oz) butter
225g (8 oz) plain flour
140g (5 oz) golden caster sugar
450g (1 lb) currants
2 tbsp orange flower water
finely-grated zest of ½ orange
60ml of Madeira wine
2 tbsp rosewater
2 large eggs, beaten
2 large egg whites
55g (2 oz) candied citron (or mixed peel), chopped

Method:

Pre-heat you oven to 160C (140C fan/320F). Grease and line a 20cm (8in) diameter springform cake tin.

Cream together the butter, sugar and orange zest until pale and fluffy. Add the beaten eggs 1/4 at a time, beating thoroughly to combine after each addition. Now mix in the Madeira wine, orange blossom water and rosewater. Mix to combine, sift over the flour and fold into the liquid ingredients.

In the meantime beat the egg whites in a clean and dry bowl until they stand in soft peaks.

Fold the egg whites into the cake batter with a metal spoon, using a folding rather than a stirring action.

Finally fold in the currants and mixed peel.

Turn the batter into the prepared cake tin, level the top with a spatula then transfer to your pre-heated oven.

Bake for 135 minutes, until the cake is nicely risen and golden and a skewer inserted into the centre emerges cleanly.

Allow to cool in the tin for 20 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.