A Date Loaf - An Heirloom Recipe Series

A Sturdy Comforting Loaf Cake - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath!

It’s been a busy few weeks around here, and most weeks I feel I am being pushed to the finish line with so many things on my to do list left undone. Living with chronic illness mean busy periods like this are generally quite unmanageable, and the to do list gets deprioritised by my body forcing me to rest.

I have been in the kitchen a lot working on recipes for a client, but after all that baking and photographing the end results, I felt the need for a nice comforting simple bake that would be a great snack on those busy days.

Which is where this Date Loaf comes in.

It felt like the perfect cake to serve as a nice hearty snack with tea, or on one day I as I found, a substitute for lunch when down time was minimal. This recipe has been on my ‘to bake’ list for this heirloom recipe series for a while, so I’m glad I somehow found the time to bake it, have it as a snack option on busy days, and share it here with you.

There are a couple of versions of this recipe in my Grandma’s collection. The older looking one is written in pencil, I think the page comes from one of her earlier notebooks. She seems to have written it out again at a later stage, luckily as you can see in the photo how difficult the original version is to read (the original version also has a rip through the middle of the page!).

When I first made this recipe, I followed Grandma’s recipe exactly, except for adding walnuts to the cake as I didn’t have any. I substituted with flaked almonds on the top which worked well.

Grandma’s original recipe has very little butter, only one tablespoon, so I was wary about how this loaf would turn out. I assume the recipe came from a time where butter was hard to get or a more expensive ingredient. I was expecting the finished loaf to be a little dry based on this, and it was. Not in a really bad way, just in a ‘this loaf definitely needs to be toasted to really be enjoyed’ kind of way.

While I have no aversion to toasting slices of a loaf cake, I did want this loaf to be something that was enjoyable to eat without toasting as well. So the next time I tried the recipe I increased the butter, and using Grandma’s fruit cake recipe as inspiration (which this loaf recipe reminded me of a little), I swapped some of the plain flour for self raising, and heated the ingredients on the stove rather than pouring over the boiling water as suggested in Grandma’s original recipe. I also increased the quantity of dates.

The result was a nice sturdy (but not dry) comforting loaf cake, perfect for a hearty snack with a cup of tea.

When my Mum tried the original recipe, she liked it toasted and said it reminded her of a date loaf her Mum would buy from the bakery. It was baked in a cylindrical tin, and Mum said the flavour and texture of Grandma’s recipe reminded her of that one.

I have seen those cylindrical date loaf tins around, mostly online where people are selling other vintage/second hand kitchenalia. I’ve never tried one of those date loaves, and feel I must investigate more as I can’t imagine how the batter stays in the tin, and how you get the baked cake out at the end!

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