Brown Sugar and Vanilla Bean Cake

Have you ever thought of what your top ten favourite ingredients are?

You know, the ones which you unconsciously stock up on whenever you go out, the ones which you naturally turn to when looking for something to bake, the ones which you bookmark with sticky notes when trawling through a new baking book.   

The ones which stop you in your tracks whenever you are browsing through numerous recipes online.

I’ve always known what I like and what I turn to but didn’t really think to list and plot them down as such.

However, I was recently trawling through amazon’s website for baking books that might look interesting and I came across a book called Baked Elements: the Importance of Being Baked in 10 Favourite Ingredients.  I’ve got the first book by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito and unfortunately have not really used it that much despite book marking a few recipes.  Something that I obviously need to rectify soon. But in this third book of theirs, they use the concept of taking their top ten favourite ingredients and making recipes around them.  I think something in my head went Kaching!

I didn’t buy the book because I will need to try out a few recipes from their first book before I do that, but the idea I readily latched on to and set about devising a top ten list of my own.  I kid you not; it took me less than two minutes.  So here it is:

1.   Vanilla Pods/Paste

2.   Cinnamon

3.   Brown Sugar

4.   Spelt Flour

5.   Greek Yoghurt

6.   Lemons

7.   Oil

8.   Cocoa Powder

9.   Yeast

10. Tea

11.  Pears

12. Dark Chocolate

13. Honey

I know, I know there are thirteen here, but I was simply and quickly writing down what I love to work with and didn’t notice at all that the designated number had been exceeded. 

These are in no particular order – in general I like to work with tea just as much as I like to work with vanilla pods or paste.  It’s just that sometimes I have more of a fixation on one ingredient and will use it a lot more than the others, but this fixation will eventually fade and I’ll begin to concentrate on another ingredient more.  It’s a kind of ebb and flow of fixations but the ingredients concerned are always the ones listed.

These favourites are specifically for the sweet baking I do.  I think I would have a completely different list for savoury cooking (a lot more spices for one thing!) or even savoury baking such as bread.  For instance, whereas I’ll always choose lemons in my sweet baking, I absolutely love limes in my savoury cooking.

This cake I made managed to use at least three of my favourite ingredients; brown sugar, spelt flour, oil and vanilla pod and paste (technically four ingredients). 

It’s beautifully rich, soft and delicious.  Although I loved the taste of the dark brown sugar in it, it was quite an apparent and obvious taste.  I think for a lot of people, using soft light brown sugar instead would be preferable.

Brown Sugar and Vanilla Bean Cake

·         250g soft dark brown sugar

·         1 egg

·         1tsp vanilla bean paste

·         160ml milk, full fat

·         190g spelt flour

·         1 tsp baking powder

·         1 vanilla pod, dried in oven and grinded down

·         113g oil

Preheat oven to 180C, prepare a 8” round cake tin.

Beat the sugar, egg, vanilla paste and milk together.

Combine the flour and baking powder together and add to the wet ingredients.  Follow with the pulverised vanilla pod.

Lastly, add the oil and mix in well – make sure the oil is well mixed in and does not separate from the batter.

Pour into the tin and bake for 35 minutes then place a foil cap on top and bake for a further 20 minutes (although start checking sooner than this as your oven might be slightly hotter)