All Souls Day Cakes

These were made a little early but were great fun for our "lesson" this morning. They involve a lot of simple mixing and at the end the dough is nice to roll about and then squash and mark. They smell really nice too (not to mention the taste - yummy!).

All Souls Day Cakes

1/4 cup of caster sugar

1/4 cup of butter

1 cup of plain flour (sifted) + a little extra flour for dusting

1 egg yolk

1/2 cup of raisins, currants or sultanas

1 tsp allspice

1 tsp mixed spice

Splash of milk

1. Cream sugar and butter together.

2. Add the egg yolk

3. Sift flour into mixture

4. Add spices

5. Add in enough milk to make a soft dough.

6. Grease a baking tin

7. Heat oven to about 180deg C

8. Take dough and take enough in hand to roll small balls out. Squash ball slightly to make a small cake shape and then put a mark on the top of the cake (in days gone by people used to make the sign of the cross on the All Soul cakes but you can mark on initials etc).

9. Put the cakes onto the tin and put in oven for about 15 minutes.

10. Cakes should be golden brown upon removal. Cool slightly and then eat (care with sultanas as they may be hot still). You can add butter if you wish but they are moist enough to eat on their own.

Our current read at the moment is Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. We love these books and Springy listens through the chapters which are quite long and peculiar in nature. We talked about the North Pole today and the way the sun goes to bed for months and then doesn't go to bed for months. Springy thought this quite strange. she knows that where we live the sun sets either over the church at midsummer or over the fields in midwinter and we always watch the sunsets (as they are so beautiful) so she seems to be quite observant of where the sun goes to bed (we can't see the sunrises here though). A few months back, Springy and I watched a Joanna Lumley documentary on the aurora borealis which was amazing to see - one day I hope both Springy and I can see it in person.

Back to the Moomins - I grew up watching a beautiful stop-motion animation of the Moomins. Since then they have been tragically turned into a cartoon animation of extremely low quality which we won't be watching anytime soon. The books though are always a delight and this particular one is very relevant to the impending cold of winter coming upon us. We were reading the bit today about the troll (Moomintroll's forebear) who lived behind the stove. It made me wish we had a woodstove because I'd love to imagine a troll of sorts rattling around behind one. Ah, atheist pagan that I am...