Baking - pictures.

[curiouswombat]

I have a couple of pictures to go with yesterday's recipes. But first - bread pudding vs bread and butter pudding.

In the parlance of most of Britain, these are not the same thing. And it seems as if North Americans call what we know as Bread and Butter Pudding, Bread Pudding. It's another of those food conundrums like biscuits...

The dish made with sliced bread, buttered and layered, usually with some type of fruit addition, then covered with egg custard mixture and baked until the bread crisps and the custard sets, is known to most of us over here as Bread and Butter Pudding. Here is a basic recipe with picture.

Bread pudding is made by taking stale bread, breaking it into chunks, and soaking it in milk, or even water, for a while. Then squeezing out the excess fluid, adding spices, sugar, an egg, and dried fruit, pressing it into a baking tin and baking it. Here is a recipe and picture of Bread Pudding. Bread pudding is eaten in a hunk like cake rather than with a spoon!

As for Wet Nelly - this was made like bread pudding - except left over cake was used and so it needed less soaking, more just damping down. Then, at least at our local bakery when I was a child, this mixture was baked between two layers of shortcrust pastry, and sprinkled with sugar. So - it was recycling old cake into new!

Anyway - pictures of fruitloaf and gingerbread

The problem is that two different brown cakes looks rather boring...




Even when you get closer to them...



But they do taste good!

Comments

[lady-branwyn.livejournal.com]

My mother made that boiled fruit cake. We called it Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake (http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,186,143165-233205,00.html) or War Cake (since it was popular when there was wartime rationing). I made it for my Dad when he was visiting a few weeks ago.

War Cake

[(Anonymous)]

That would be the one. The original recipe called for lard, but since butter is easier to obtain these days I used that. I can see why it was 'war cake'. I would think even getting the dried fruit would have been an epic battle. We had rationing in Australia too.

Re: War Cake

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I guess in America they might have been able to dried some of their own vine fruits - whereas it was the period where bakers in the UK were experimenting with adding root vegetables to cake to eke it out - and boiling the dried fruit, or soaking it in water or tea, would have plumped it up to make it look 'more' - and make for a moister cake from poorer quality currants, I guess!

Plain cakes were 'plainer' too I think. Nowadays when I make a plain cake to sandwich with jam I use a Victoria mixture - but when I was a child I remember a more solid plain cake - I think it had more flour than butter or sugar, and possible milk instead of some of the eggs. It was one of my grandfather's favourites, sandwiched together with frosting flavoured with cocoa. Frosting rather than butter cream as it had milk as well as the utter - again a more frugal version.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

They are the sort of family recipes that we really need to keep - and encourage people to bake!