Interview with Anna Weston of A Global Bakery

This week I enjoyed a cup of coffee and a chat in Oxford with Anna Weston, author of The Global Bakery: Amazing Cakes from the World’s Kitchens. We had a long talk about baking, fancy-pants equipment, the delights of sharing cakes, and the wonderful opportunities for ingredients shopping on the Cowley Road.

I started by asking her how she chose which cakes would feature in her book. As she says in her Introduction, she began with the premise that every culture has a cake; and so she made a list of all 197 countries in the world, and started filling it with cakes. The internet, of course, was an invaluable tool in her research, but colleagues, family, and foreign exchange students were all eager to share recipes and tips for the cakes of their homelands. One of the best compliments Anna has received since the publication of the book is the number of people who have told her that a certain cake reminds them of their childhood, their grandmother, or their travels abroad. More proof for the theory that cake is a source of happy memories!

I was interested to hear how the final selection of 64 came about. Both Anna and her publisher were clear that they wanted a range of types of cakes, a good coverage of countries across the world, the avoidance of too much duplication of key ingredients (a challenge, given that many cakes from the same broad region share the same flavours – like oranges and honey in the Middle East), and of course, some personal favourites. Anna also wanted to be able to say to her readers, ‘you can do this at home’. So, no special equipment or techniques which couldn’t be easily explained. Finally, the recipes all had to be cakes – an obvious point, perhaps, but one which led to an interesting discussion of what this meant. Both of us agreed that not all sweet things can be counted as cakes, as some other food writers have expansively decided. For Anna, the defining characteristic of a cake is its texture (something which is hard to pin down in words) and its sweetness. The ingredients are less important – not all cakes include hard fats, for example. The method can also vary: the New Zealand Louise Cake which features in the book, starts off with rubbing fat into flour, like a shortbread – though it actually comes out tasting very cakey. Only two recipes in the book defy these rules: the Czech Buchty, which is a yeasted bread (the Czechs apparently don’t really do cakes) – but one which is filled with a delicious-sounding cottage cheese, poppy-seed-and-sugar-mix; and a Swiss Nusstorte (tart) which – how to put this delicately? – was the result of a heavy steer from a publisher. It is, however, ‘to die for’ according to Anna, so we can perhaps forgive it its place.

One of the most interesting things about Anna’s book is the idea of a ‘global’ bakery. It really shows us both the common features and the individual traits of cakes in different lands. The entry from Patagonia, for example, is a Welsh Cake, which was carried over by Welsh settlers and has remained a favourite, relatively unchanged over time. But at the other end of the spectrum, some cakes reveal very different local tastes: the Taiwanese Sweet Potato Cake was very unpopular among Anna’s tasters because of its lack of sweetness; while one colleague threatened to strike when faced with the Italian Castagnaccio or Chestnut Cake – a beautifully fudgy looking cake which is surprisingly low on sugar (Anna explained why: it’s traditionally served alongside sweet wine). It seems from all this that although, as the Czech example shows, cake is not necessarily universal, the desire for sweetness in a comforting slice of something, is.

We ended by talking about the way we bake. Anna is keen for people to feel they can get it right without a lot of prior knowledge or special equipment. In fact, readers may be tickled to hear that she didn’t get on at all with her own fancy mixer, and made all the cakes for her book using just an electric hand whisk (it died, presumably of exhaustion, immediately after the book was finished!). As she told me, a cake doesn’t need to be domestic-goddess-perfect: ‘people appreciate the time you’ve taken to bake.’ But will she be entering the Great British Bake Off? Not a chance. In her own words, ‘I’m a family baker. I could no more produce a windmill made of sugar than fly – and I don’t want to.’

Anna’s top tips

As well as using self-raising flour, add a good teaspoon of baking powder when making a Victoria Sandwich

Do it the Women’s Institute way: weigh your eggs in their shells, and match the weight in the flour, sugar and butter.

Want an easy cake? Go for the Bara Brith – and add two generous tablespoons of marmalade to the mixture to give it a lovely glaze and extra flavour.

Want a decadent showstopper? Make the Tres Leches (three milks): ‘Heaven with the gate shut’!

To make meringues, make sure your beaters are clean and cold

Start to check your cake ten minutes before the end of the cooking time: all ovens are different.

And finally, don’t be afraid to experiment and change things around!

What the Greeks did for us …they made cakes!

Yes yes, I know it should be the Romans, and the Romans had their share of cakes too – but the Greeks really knew what they were about when it came to baked goods. They had an absolutely bewildering array baked in different shapes and for different purposes. They were served on feasts, birthdays and as snacks, and as temple offerings (they were often round in shape in honour of Artemis, the goddess of the moon). The Greeks even started the tradition of putting candles on cakes, again for Artemis and her lunar light. The most common name for these dainties was ‘Plakous’ (meaning ‘flat’)  – the origin of the word ‘placenta’, which is literally life-giving and nourishing.

A Greek vase depicting an all-male Symposium, at which cakes were served for staying up all night. Source

Not too many written recipes have survived from this time, but we do have several for cakes of different types, while others are described in plays and paintings in the last centuries BC (there was a whole book called On Cakes by Iatrocles, but it sadly has not come down to us). We even have some more immediate evidence from the ash-preserved ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where excavations have turned up individual cake tins, and carbonised cakes in several different shapes.

Some of these cakes were everyday, some were for special occasions. Some clearly had a cheeky side: Heraclides of Syracuse described festival cakes of sesame and honey called ‘mylloi’ which were made in the shape of female genitals in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone; while the Spartans made cakes called Kribanai in the shape of women’s breasts. The pyramid-shaped Pyramous, which were made from toasted wheat soaked in honey, were given as prizes to men who stayed awake through all-night Symposia (drinking festivals), and many other cakes were served at bars as well as at home. Others still were more like sweetened bread or pizzas, made using local specialities like dried figs, dates and sheep’s cheese. We can see that the line between bread and cake was a fine one, especially with dainties like the Cretan Glykinai, which got their sweetness only from sweet wine. Others used a natural leavener derived from wine-making, called must (these were traditionally served on fresh bay leaves, which lent a subtle flavour as well as some extra moistness from their oil).

So we can say with some confidence that while most of the world was making fairly primitive bread, the Greeks were enjoying their cakes with some gusto. Their liberal use of honey has been preserved in many modern Greek cakes too – witness the syrupy baklava and honey cakes we still enjoy today. Who knew they had such a pedigree?

 

Book review: The Global Bakery

I recently read an article in the local paper about a new book by an Oxford writer and baker: Anna Weston’s The Global Bakery. It sounded right up my street so I ordered a copy straight away.

The book doesn’t disappoint. Anna is a keen baker herself and was driven to write the book by the thought that every culture must have a favourite cake. Since she couldn’t possibly visit every country to find out for herself, she armed herself with a list and turned to the web to find out more. The result is a lovely recipe tour around the globe, with every cake tried and tested by Anna and her willing colleagues.

I haven’t tried any of the recipes yet, but I definitely will; the photos and titles alone had The Scientist and I salivating. The very first recipe, for Gateau Moelleux a l’Ananas et a la Noix de Coco (Soft Cake with Pineapple and Coconut) from the Cote d’Ivoire, will be right up there, as will the Bibingka (a coconutty cake from the Philippines), the Valmuefro Kage (Poppy Seed Cake) from Denmark and the St Lucian Banana Cake. The Scientist has put in an order for the Schwarzwaldertorte (known to most of us outside Germany as the Black Forest Gateau), but had a moment of wavering when he saw the photo on the opposite page, for a Hungarian Chocolate Mousse Cake.

One of the treats of this book though, is that it includes cakes which are very far from Western tastes, which can’t help but make the reader think again about what cake means to different people (I recently read in Martin Jones’ Feast that sharing food is a way of crafting nationhood, and we certainly see that here in the use of local ingredients and shared produce). I have to admit to not fancying the strangely pink-topped Guava Chiffon Cake from Hawaii (sorry), while the author states frankly that another pink-filled offering, the Taiawanese Sweet Potato Cake ‘didn’t meet with universal acclaim’ from her colleagues (although the basic cake apparently makes a very nice Swiss Roll)! Recipes include jaggery (a form of sugar), coconut milk, chestnut flour, guava and – yes, sweet potato (alternatives are suggested if the originals are hard to come by, although all can be found in more exotic grocery shops). Several use gluten-free flours, or are dairy free. Some are complicated while others are straightforward.

This book really will have something for everyone. I would (obviously!) have loved to know a bit more about the history and background of some of the cakes, but I’m sure they can be followed up further thanks to the marvel of the web.

You can find out more, and order it here.

(Disclaimer – I wasn’t paid to write this review or sent the book by the publisher. It really is that good!)

Summer sewing: Long Beach Board Shorts

I’ve been a bit slow to get going with the ‘pocket of pins’ part of this blog so far, though that’s not for lack of new projects! I can’t kid myself that summer sewing is on anyone’s horizon in the northern hemisphere any more – though maybe someone further south can benefit from this top tip for a pattern. It’s Terra’s Treasures Long Beach Board Shorts and I think I made it six times over this summer – three times for Munchkin, and three times for various of his cousins. The ones pictured here are the cousins’ ones. All used a cotton with a bit of stretch in it for the main part, and printed cottons for the contrast (Monsters University, superhero words, and monkeys, if you can’t see them). I like the superhero words so much that I made Munchkin an identical pair. Another of his pairs used quilting cottons for both parts, so the stretch isn’t essential.

This is just a fabulous pattern. It’s not as hard as it looks (it’s just a bit of piping but it adds a really great finish), it doesn’t take long, and the opportunities for using small bits of novelty fabric are sky high. They’re elasticated at the back which got the thumbs up from the tall, slim cousin who got the top pair, and even accommodate a cloth nappy, which got the thumbs up from Munchkin (actually he couldn’t care less, but it got the thumbs up from me). It comes in sizes 6m to 12 years and is a unisex deisgn. The boys’ version are longer, but I made most of my pairs midway between the boy and girl length. I will be making these for as long as Munchkin will wear things made by mum!