Tea loaf

I have something of a taste for old-fashioned cakes. I'll happily forgo a slice of rainbow layer cake, or red velvet cake, or chocolate fondant cake (especially chocolate fondant cake); but passing over fruitcake, gingerbread or banana bread is another matter entirely. There's something rather attractive in the austere plainness of those tea-table stalwarts, not least the idea of the tea-table itself - no sugar high, no hundreds and thousands, no coloured cream-cheese 'frosting' - although I'm sure many a housekeeper would turn in her grave to hear me dare to describe anything requiring a pound of dried fruit as 'austere'.

A tea loaf is one of the simplest ways to indulge in a little retro tea-time fancy. All it really requires is a good soaking in tea of your dried fruit, overnight, and a couple of minutes to beat in some flour and egg the next day - much less labour-intensive and much less expensive than a proper rich, dark fruit cake (although I can't pretend it is a true substitute for the latter). Once baked, let it cool properly, so that you can cut a neat little slice (rather than a crumbly, hot-fruit one), pour yourself a cup of tea and revel in your imaginary prim and proper-ness.

Tea loaf

(The recipe I use is adapted from Nigella Lawson, Feast)

• 375g dried fruit, whatever you like best - I used about 150g raisins, 125g prunes, 50g glace cherries, and 50g currants
• One mug strong, black tea (I drink Yorkshire Gold, which obviously enhances the whole effect...!)
• 125g dark brown sugar
• 250g plain flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• about 1/2 teaspoon mixed spice 
• 1 egg

1. Dice the bigger pieces of fruit, ie the prunes and glace cherries, into more manageable, chunky pieces (don't do this for the raisins and currants or you will have fruit sawdust in your loaf, not lovely damp fruit!)
2. Put the fruit in a bowl with the sugar, make your cup of nice hot black tea, pour this over and give everything a good stir to dissolve the sugar and combine. Leave to soak overnight - I left this for almost a day, in fact. 
3. The next day, preheat your oven to about 160 C (my oven tends to nuke everything, it's a fan oven, but a slightly higher heat might be necessary in another oven). Beat the flour, baking powder, bicarb and spice into the fruit mixture, which should be really plumped up and gorgeous, then the egg. 
4. Pour into a lined loaf tin and bake for an hour, then check with a skewer and see if it needs any more time - the most recent one I made took about 1hr 10 minutes. The skewer won't be spotlessly clean, because of the lovely fruit jamminess, but you don't want any evident liquid cake batter sticking to it. 
5. Once baked, let it cool in the tin, and then turn out and cool on a rack. Don't slice until completely cool - as I have learnt, a warm cake doesn't slice neatly, is apt to crumble and you can lose the flavour in the steam of a hot mouthful. Enjoy your slice with another cup of tea, for breakfast if you are greedy like me, or for afternoon tea if you are indulging in whimsy.