August 19, 2010

High Tea and a call out for recipe help





















With many thanks to my sister, we had a lovely High Tea one afternoon at the Caledonian Hotel. Note the photo when you click on the highlighted link - on the top tier to the right is a tea cake that was delicious - the waiter was not very up on what was in the cake, he asked the kitchen and they said "fruit cake". Kind of too general so I have google imaged a thousand cakes and came up with this one that seemed close to appearance. A Dark Genoa Cake. Versus a light one. What makes it dark? I don't know. I cannot even find a recipe for it and have emailed a blogger friend in the cooking-know (who also seems to read a lot of sleuthing books so I have hopes!)to see if she might track something down.
Dear Readers, do you think it is a Genoa Cake? I have some concerns it might be a different kind of fruit tea cake like a Selkirk or a Sultana Fruit cake when I have looked online but none of those had that darkness to them that the photo of the Genoa had. Do you know what such a cake is? Do we have recipes?
The call is out.

3 comments:

rachel said...

Don't wish to be pessimistic, Susan, especially in the matter of cakes, but every baker has her own favourite fruit cake, and many such cakes aren't really a named 'type' - dark or light can depend on the individual recipe for just plain 'fruit cake' as much as the baker's preference. Any difference in my fruit cakes is caused by the proportion of dried fruit to flour, as well as the use of black tea.

Mary Berry and Delia Smith offer different recipes for light or dark fruit cakes, I recall.....

Elizabeth Musgrave said...

Looks to me like the kind of fruit cake where you soak the fruit in tea perhaps? Get that lovely darker colour that way. Treacle in the recipe also gives a nice dark cake. That tea table looks fabulous!

Susan Moorhead said...

I never heard of soaking a cake in tea - sounds really interesting!