What is your favourite food memory?

If I were to ask this question to most people I know, the answer would most often be a food that they particularly relished in their childhood, made by someone they love.

For some, a favourite food memory would probably consist of an ever dependable, simple flavoured comfort dish that they grew up eating with the family. For others, the memory could be a rare treat that they eagerly awaited on special occasions.

In my case, it was the latter.

My fondest food memory is about everything that went into making and eating a warm slice of homemade cake, packed with plump, hot raisins and walnuts. My first ever memory of a cake, any cake, is this one. My mother would inevitably bake it on a day off from work, usually a Saturday. However, the best part was that I never knew if it was going to be a ‘cake Saturday’ on a given weekend.

It was only after we ate our lunch, and my mother began assembling the cake ingredients that I would happily realise what a scrumptious afternoon laid ahead. 

I would watch intently as she first whisked the homemade butter and fine sugar by hand in a really wide and deep steel dish (electric hand whisks and stand-in mixers were yet to make their debut).

Eggs would then be added to the creamy white batter along with vanilla, one at a time. 

Back then, flavouring a cake with vanilla meant opening a tiny bottle with a blue and orange label that read Viola’s Vanilla and pouring some of it into your batter. I would have laughed then had someone told me that you could scrape some beans into a cake for a nicer flavour.

To this day, sniffing that bottle of ridiculously synthetic vanilla flavouring makes me think of cake.

The batter would be ready for the oven once the flour and chopped walnuts and raisins were folded into it. We had a large and round aluminium oven, with a glass lid on top, which enabled you to check on the rise (or fall) of your cake right to the finish.

Fifteen minutes into the baking, our flat would be redolent with a scrumptious aroma of the most deliciously nutty cake. All you had to do after that was wait. Just wait until the cake baked through with a perfect brown crust, and had suitably cooled in the oven to be taken out, cut and eaten.

Sinking my teeth into that first warm slice was satisfying beyond words. It was the perfect Saturday afternoon treat. The cake would be soft and moist, and flecked with hot raisins that would have plumped up to their old grape selves during their time in the oven. If my father happened to come home early from work by some great stroke of luck, we would have a great evening tea with that cake for company.

No doubt, it remains a great cake to make on a relaxed weekend and share with friends and family over a lovely tea.

Nostalgia Cake

Ingredients:

100 gm flour

50 gm semolina (rawa)

130 gm caster sugar

25 gm demerrara sugar

150 gm salted butter (softened; I use Amul)

3 eggs

60 gm chopped walnuts and raisins

2 tsp vanilla essence or 1 vanilla bean (slit lengthwise and scrape seeds out)

1 and a 1/2 tsp baking powder

Method:

Pre-heat the oven at 160 degree Centigrade or at 130 degree Centigrade for an oven with a fan. Grease an 8-inch (20 cm) round baking tin or a 7-inch (18 cm) square baking tin with butter and dust it with flour.

Sift the flour, semolina and baking powder and set aside.

Cream the softened butter until pale and fluffy in a large bowl with an electric hand whisk or a wooden spoon/spatula. Add the caster sugar to it, bit by bit, until fully incorporated. 

Whisk the eggs and the vanilla together until very frothy. Gently fold in the eggs into the butter mixture with a spatula.

Do not over mix or the batter will lose all the air bubbles that are going to make the cake light and fluffy.

Similarly, fold in the flour mixture and the nuts and raisins, bit by bit.

Pour batter into prepared tin and bake at 150 to 160 degree Centigrade for 35 – 40 minutes or until a knife inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Let the oven temperature fall gradually over a few minutes before getting the cake out.

Slice and serve with tea, coffee or even hot chocolate.