Delia Smith's Book of Cakes 1977

What a lovely picture of the young Delia Smith. This book is rather old-fashioned in its presentation, but has a wealth of usable recipes.

I reviewed one of her recipes on my gluten free blog Gluten Free with Susie C, and I think it's worth repeating it here for you:

Delia Smith's Book of Cakes (Hodder & Stouton 1977).
An updated version is now available from Amazon, but reading the reviews, I think I'm glad I have the old edition - not because of the content, but because of the styling.

That aside, I checked the recipes and found all these flour-free cakes:

Coffee Cream Mousseline

Rice Cake

Greek Orange and Almond Cake

Whole Oat Flapjacks (for those who can eat oats)

Black Forest Cake

Chocolate Log

Moist Chocolate and Rum Squares

Squidgy Chocolate Cake

Macaroons

Cheats Lemon Gateau (use gluten-free sponge fingers)

Orange and Lemon Refrigerator Cakes (use gluten-free digestives)

Pavlova

I am now going to start making my way through some of my other baking books to see what wonders lie within. I particularly like the sound of the mousse-style cakes in this book and think they would make wonderful desserts

The first cake I'm going to try is her Rice Cake, which she oddly says is good for people who don't like fruit cake. Here goes!

The cake starts with  8oz sugar and 4oz butter creamed together, as for a normal sponge, but she then suggests you add three egg yolks only to the mix before whisking again. Add the grated rind of a lemon.

She then suggests you whisk the three egg whites on their own to form soft peaks before adding them with 8oz ground rice to the sugar/butter mix. I decided to mix the rice into the butter/sugar before adding the egg whites as I didn't want to beat out all the air when mixing.

Having used a wooden spoon for the beating, to incorporate as much air as possible (and an electric mixer for the egg whites), I changed to a metal spoon to mix the two bowls together.

The mixture was still quite firm when it went into the oven and I was able to smooth the top nice and evenly. As I have a fan oven, I turned it down ten degrees from her 180 degree suggested heat. It stayed in there for an hour.

Sadly, this cake wasn't a huge success. It is still edible, but there are a few issues that I am not happy with.

Firstly, I didn't brush the side of the baking tin with melted butter like Delia asked me to. I thought that a non-stick pan would do OK without this. However, it is obvious to me now that it did need doing, as the cake didn't rise properly. If it had been able to slide up the side of the tin as it rose, it would all be the same height instead of lower at the sides.

I think this contributed to issue number two, which is the texture. It was cooked (knife coming out clean test), but is very close-textured. I think this is because it didn't rise properly. Also, it is rather grainy on the tongue. I thought that perhaps the long cooking time would allow the ground rice time to cook and amalgamate with the rest of the mixture. Not so. It is still a bit grainy.

So, for this attempt, I give it 6/10. If it was cooked the way Delia intended, I think it would get 8/10.