Earl Grey Loaf Cake

A moist loaf cake with all the aromas and delicate taste of earl grey tea. Ideal as a breakfast cake or an accompaniment for your afternoon cuppa.

This cake tastes of earl grey tea. It really does. Not just a hint that you have to help along with a bit of imagination. It’s there. It’s earlgrey-y. It’s like drinking a cup of tea. My original plan was to use earl grey in a chocolate cake. I may still do this at some point, but this time I wanted something where this special flavour would be the star, rather than using it just to enhance the taste of chocolate, which is what I thought might happen with a choccie cake. You know, like when we use espresso to bring out the cocoa tones? (in this cake for example) You don’t actually taste the coffee. Well, here you actually taste the tea. Have I stressed this point enough? Ok, thought so.

So, a moist loaf cake with a lovely dark brown colour. Its moistness comes from the satisfyingly significant amount of butter, which however is made up for by the fairly small amount of sugar. Not being one to worry about all that, I thought I should up the sweetness a bit, so I sprinkled some demerara over the top of the batter before it went in the oven. Good decision. To get the tea flavour a bit of cream is infused with earl grey leaves. Quite a few of them. So fyi, there is some caffeine in this cake…

The cake kept really well in a tin; I left it on the baking paper and sat the whole thing on a piece of kitchen paper. After several days the last piece of cake had just started to dry out a bit, something that was easily rectified with a few seconds in the microwave. In the end, that might have been the best piece.