Monday 16 July 2012

MacArthur Parkin


The perfect recipe for the weather we've been having lately: the cake you can leave out in the rain*

Ideal for round-the-world yachtspeople; goes lovely with a mug of tea.

Ingredients

 4 oz butter
4 oz Muscovado sugar
2 eggs
10 oz molasses
8 oz flour
1 tsp ginger
4 oz preserved ginger
2 tbsp milk
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
Beat the sugar with the butter, mix in the eggs and treacle, sift in the flour and ginger and add the preserved ginger; warm the milk, add the bicarb to it and stir into the mixture.

Pour the mix into a lined, greased 7" cake tin, and bake at mark 3, 160° for 1½ hours. Remove from the oven, and leave it out in the rain for 24 hours, or as long as you feel like.

Print this, and present it to anyone who expresses doubt as to their ability to get the recipe.



*especially if you put it in a Tupperware box.
 



4 comments:

  1. this is definitely parkin weather. Try using a proportion of fine oatmeal instead of some of the flour- it improves the taste and the keeping qualities (if you can hide it!!)

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  2. a good suggestion, Gwynneth! - I used to make great lumps of flapjack, baked into billycans, for expeditioning food, and threw anything that looked interesting and/or high energy into it. Toasted sesame seeds went well. Maybe I'll try that again...

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  3. I do 'get' the clever reference to Richard Harris' late 1968 hit MacArthur Park! I loved that song, even though many have thought it tedious and pretentious. I once found a book that rated it one of the ten worse songs ever produced! How misguided.

    You haven't described how to make the sweet green icing.

    Lucy

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