Happy Days Honey Cake

Author: Mary Cook

From an early age, I dreamed of a self-sufficient lifestyle. But I was raised in a city on England’s south coast. The nearest I came to my dream was catching shellfish off the local pier and cooking them with herbs gathered from the city’s wartime bombsites.

Eventually I married a man with similar ideals and we moved to a “plotlands” development near London. “Plotlands” were areas of poor farmland sold cheaply between the two World Wars as building plots where city families built weekend homes. In time, the developments became full-time homes to thriving communities.

After the Second World War, many residents were lured back to city life by such luxuries as mains electricity, running water and flushing lavatories. Plotland communities collapsed and most of their houses followed suit.

When my husband and I arrived on the scene, the area belonged to a development corporation who planned to turn it into a nature park, together with a local history museum. We persuaded them to let us have one of the few remaining houses for a low rent. In return we acted as volunteer wardens.

Our venture was part experiment in self-reliant living, part necessity born of poverty. Soon our backyard was running with livestock. There was Rosie the goat who thought she was a dog and took walks with our dogs, Foxy and Golly. When she was tethered in the yard, she wouldn’t let us pass without giving her a kiss. Her companions were four bantam hens named after operatic heroines, three ducks and two colonies of honey bees.

We spent four years trying to live off the land while renovating our dilapidated rented house - a shed with delusions of grandeur. As I became increasingly proficient at beekeeping, I published numerous articles on the subject. One day I was commissioned out of the blue to write a beekeeping manual. I wanted to include a chapter on cooking with honey but baking wasn’t my strong point. That was partly because I was working in such primitive conditions and partly because I am to cookery what Lucrezia Borghia was to health-care.

After a great deal of trial and error, I devised this idiot-proof recipe. It’s so simple it hurts! Now I bake my Happy Days Honey Cake whenever I want to recall our pioneering period.

Ah, happy days!

Happy Days Honey Cake Recipe

Ingredients

4 oz butter or margarine
6 oz honey (clear or set)
6 oz sultanas
8 oz self rising flour
2 duck eggs
Milk to mix if needed

Instructions

Cream the butter and honey together in a mixing bowl.
Beat the eggs and add them alternately with the sifted flour to the mixture.
Mix well and add a little milk if the mixture seems too stiff.
Add the sultanas with a little flour and mix well.
Bake in a prepared 7 ½ in cake tin for 1 ¼ to 1 ½ hours in a moderate oven.

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