I'd be the first to admit that my baking isn't up to much. Bread, yes. But cakes and pastry, hopeless. But all the books say that if you only follow the recipes to the letter, it'll turn out right.
I've been caught before, by a River Cottage recipe published in a Sunday supplement that promised a fabulous orange & caraway cake. It turned out like the worst sort of boiled baby stodgy pudding served up for school dinners.
This time my eye was taken by a lovely picture of a Bara Brith Tea Loaf, apparently as served by Fortnum & Mason. Here's the link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/9437922/Bara-brith-tea-loaf-recipe.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/9437922/Bara-brith-tea-loaf-recipe.html)
Doesn't that look fabulous? And since Mrs Melbourne12 is very partial to a slice of fruit loaf, I thought I'd give it a try.
Disaster. The skilled cake-makers may be able to spot the fatal mistake in the recipe, but I didn't.
So what happened? I was very happy with the consistency of the mixture, and carefully spooned it into a large loaf tin. After an hour and twenty minutes, it looked pretty well done, and I was just (prematurely) beginning to congratulate myself. I left it to cool a little, then turned it out onto a wire rack.
At which point it fell in half and to my horror the middle was still quite uncooked.
So I reassembled the wreckage and shoved it back in the oven. And I did what I should have done in the first place, which was use a probe thermometer. It took another hour and a half - THREE HOURS in total - for the middle to reach 195F, which I understand to be the minimum cooked temperature for cake.
It's edible, in fact it's delicious if you don't mind the rather crispy edges. But why, oh why did they give an ingredients list for well over 3 pounds of mixture but a tin size and cooking times for a 2 pound cake?
Cooking times vary form oven to oven and depending on a cake's moisture content and the tin's dimensions. I have a recipe for rhubarb cake that can take a half hour longer than stated with very juicy young rhubarb and I find fruit cakes vary enormously too.
Always test with a clean skewer before removing from the oven. If it doesn't come out clean when poked in the middle of the cake, cook for another 5 minutes and test again until it's done.