This is adapted from a basic recipe in ‘The complete farmhouse kitchen cookbook’ – now a very old and rebound book with stains on the pages.
INGREDIENTS:
- 175g margarine or butter – room temperature
- 175g caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 125g self-raising flour
- 75g plain flour
- 50g ground almonds or almond flour
- 175g glace cherries, washed, dried and cut into halves and quarters
METHOD:
- Set the oven to 160C, and grease a 18cm square tin or 20cm round tin, and line with baking paper. I have also used a large loaf tin in an emergency, but the square tin works the best
- Beat the fat and the sugar together to form a cream
- Beat in the eggs one at a time
- Sift the flours together and mix in the cherries so they are well coated (this keeps them apart in the cake) then stir in the ground almonds
- Add the flour/almond/cherry mix to the butter/sugar/egg mixture, and fold until well mixed, and pour into the tin
- Bake for 1 1/4 hours until firm and slightly shrinking from the sides of the tin
As a PS – if you sprinkle a little demerara sugar on the top just before putting into the oven…