I'm in the midst of researching my next historical saga, which will be called The Bakery Girls. As the title suggests, it's set in a bakery and I'm knee deep in bread and cakes. It's not a bad place to be. The novel will include the fictional birth of a Sunderland local delicacy, the pink slice cake.
And so, I've been baking pink slice.
For those outside the area wanting to know what pink slice is, it's two layers of shortbread with jam in the middle and if that's not enough sugar and fat for you, it's got pink icing on top. It looks like this, taken from the wonderful
Mackem CewkBook. And it tastes amazing.
I've already baked pink slice using the recipe from the Mackem Cewkbook and my pink slice came out looking like this.
They were delicious and once you start eating it, you can't stop. Really easy to make too. I highly recommend the recipe in the
Mackem CewkBook
But where did pink slice originally come from?
A quick search online suggests it's based on a recipe from the the Bero book of baking in 1923, which includes a recipe for "Rich Jam Cake."
This is two slices of shortbread with jam in the middle, but no icing on top. Here's the 1923 recipe from Bero, available free and online from the Bero archives.
I baked the 1923 recipe, using butter instead of lard. While my books are all about authenticity, I drew the line at eating lard. My cholesterol level breathed a sigh of relief than went into a tailspin when it saw the amount of butter and sugar.
Here are more pics from my baking process. Two rounds of shortbread smothered in jam. I chose raspberry jam but it'd work well with any flavour jam, or marmalade.
Here it is when it came out of the oven and had cooled down so I could cut it into pieces.
The Bero 1923 recipe said cut it into "dainty triangles or squares". The use of the word dainty suggests this was an afternoon tea treat, perhaps for ladies, rather than something a miner would stick in his bait box, to have as pudding, down the pit.
How did it taste?
Well, it tasted more like a biscuit than a cake and not as tasty as the pink slice cake I'd baked from the recipe in the Mackem Cewkbook, which was a taste from childhood I remembered well.
The 1923 cake was thinner so the shortbread had more of a snap. Mind you, the Mackem Cewkbook recipe did tell me to leave the pink slice overnight which gave it a wonderful dense texture. Leaving the 1923 cake overnight might be difficult. They're gorgeous and may disappear before tonight.
The instructions in the 1923 recipe were also a bit vague. It says to use "flour" but doesn't say whether that's plain or self-raising so I used plain. It then says "bake at a moderately hot oven" so I guessed at 180 degrees in a fan oven for 20 minutes. The shortbread still looked anaemic after 20 mins so I left it in for another 5 minutes until it looked fine.
So, have I found the mystery of the origin of Sunderland pink slice?
Possibly.
However, there's more to this tale that goes far earlier than the Bero book and far wider than Sunderland... and England. My research shows this from academic books and papers I've read. There are also other stories I've heard and other recipes I've yet to bake.
Stay tuned for the mystery of Sunderland's pink slice. Together we will solve it and all will be revealed in The Bakery Girls.
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