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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  A lemony-rosy Easter twist
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A lemony-rosy Easter twist

Inspired by the traditonal Easter treat, this cake is more spring-like in flavour

Crimp the edges of the marzipan for the Lemon and Cardamom Simnel Cake. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Crimp the edges of the marzipan for the Lemon and Cardamom Simnel Cake. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

My heart leapt the other day in Old Delhi when I saw the season’s first mulberries. They were lying on a crumpled piece of newspaper on a dirty and congested stretch of pavement in the spice market, obviously recently foraged from a nearby tree. There was no fancy display, no plastic packaging, just a few rose petals strewn over them, but nonetheless a powerful reminder of one of the things I love most about living in India: Food still has its seasons.

Fruit and vegetables arrive when they’re supposed to and not on a plane from the other side of the world. People cherish the special foods made for festivals like Navratri—as I write this on Ashtami, my neighbourhood is twittering with the sound of little girls running around clutching plates of chana-puri and halwa.

Our fresh produce in Britain may be flown in from around the world so that no one knows quite when strawberry season is any more, but one thing we’re still quite good at is marking the year with special cakes, breads, pies and biscuits. In the next few weeks we’ll be enjoying Easter treats like hot cross buns.

I’ll be spending Easter with my sister in deepest Wales and there’s one seasonal treat I can guarantee she won’t be making: Simnel Cake. This is because our mother, for some unknown or forgotten reason, didn’t eat anything with nuts in it and encouraged us children to follow suit. While I’ve managed to overcome this and embrace all things nutty, my sister never did. In fact even I had never got around to making Simnel Cake until this week, which is a shame because it’s one of the greats of the British baking repertoire.

It was once the cake that servant girls took home to their mothers on Mothering Sunday, at the mid-point of the 40-day Lenten fast, but now it is more usually seen at Easter. It is essentially not unlike Christmas cake in that it contains the same kinds of dried fruits—in fact it’s a great way of using up any glacé cherries, candied peel and dried fruit that you might still have lying around from that festive season. The main difference is the use of marzipan.

At Christmas marzipan is used as a layer underneath the icing. Simnel Cake has a layer of marzipan running through the middle of the cake, is “iced" with marzipan and decorated with 11 little balls of marzipan to represent Jesus’ apostles (Judas, who betrayed the Lord, is not usually represented). The cake’s flavouring is traditionally a combination of nutmeg/cinnamon/ginger/allspice, but I thought it might be more spring-like with lemon and cardamom. And for a completely Indian Easter, I’ve flavoured the marzipan with rose water.

Lemon and Cardamom Simnel Cake

Serves 12

Ingredients

For the marzipan (you can buy it ready-made but it’s not so nice)

250g icing sugar

175g caster sugar

350g almonds, ground

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tsp rose water

For the cake

100g glacé cherries, chopped

50g chopped candied peel

450g mixed dried fruit (I used raisins and currants but you can use whatever you like best)

Finely grated zest and juice of 2 lemons

200g soft unsalted butter

200g soft Muscovado sugar

4 eggs, lightly beaten

225g plain flour (maida)

1 tsp ground cardamom seeds (from about 8 pods)

For decorating the cake

2 tbsp apricot jam, warmed slightly

White of 1 egg, lightly whisked

20cm cake tin with a removable base

Method

Grease and line the cake tin. To make the marzipan, first sift the icing sugar into a large bowl, then add the caster sugar and ground almonds. Add the eggs and rose water and mix well with your hands until you form a firm dough. Sprinkle some sifted icing sugar on to the work surface and knead the marzipan for a couple of minutes until it’s smooth. Wrap the marzipan in cling film and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Put the cherries, candied peel and dried fruit in another large bowl with the lemon zest and juice, mix well, then leave to macerate for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius. To make the cake, first beat together the sugar and butter with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then stir in the flour and cardamom. Finally mix in the dried fruit and mix well.

Spread half of the cake mixture smoothly into the prepared tin. Sprinkle some sifted icing sugar on the work surface, take one-third of the chilled marzipan and gently roll it out to a circle the same size as the cake tin. Lay the marzipan disc on top of the cake mixture in the tin. Spread the rest of the cake mixture on top of the marzipan. Put the cake in the oven and bake for about one and a half hours, or until it is well browned on top and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. If the top of the cake starts to brown too quickly, cover loosely with foil. Take the cake out of the oven and leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before turning it out on to a rack to cool completely.

When the cake is cool, roll out another disc of marzipan to cover the top. Brush the surface of the cake with the warmed apricot jam and press the marzipan on to it. Crimp the edges of the marzipan with your fingers. From the remaining marzipan roll out 11 balls and use the egg white to stick them to the cake. If you have a kitchen blow torch, you can burnish the marzipan surface a little if you wish. Decorate with a wide yellow ribbon tied round the side of the cake.

Happy Easter!

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com.

Also Read | Pamela’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 12 Apr 2014, 12:06 AM IST
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