If you are lucky enough to live in Ilkley, or visit Ilkley this summer it will not take you long to find a cafe called Toast House.
If you need a little help finding it, head north, from Leeds along the A65 to 22 Leeds Road and you will see the cute sign board outside the cafe on the lefthand side, a few hundred metres before you get to the main set of traffic lights.
Once inside Toast House you won't want to leave because it contains all the best things in life. Fresh coffee, delicately flavoured teas, the smell of toast and roasting spices, lovely vintage finds, babies that don't cry, squishy sofas to nod off on and people that actually smile. This week they also had a cake full of ingredients that are good for you.
When I heard about this cake from Lisa Jenkins and Natasha Byers, the two wonderful, lovely ladies who make Toast House possible I told them I thought more people ought to know about it.
They both looked at me kindly and said they would spill the beans on the recipe for the cake if I offered to write it up as a blog post for all their fabulous customers who might like to make it for themselves when Toast House is closed on Sundays and Mondays.
So here is the recipe for the cake from Lisa. You may have guessed this dark, moist, fragrant cake contains fruit and vegetables because that is quite usual in cakes these days. But who would have guessed which ones?
Spiced apple fruit cake with haricot beans
Ingredients
- 175 g plain flour
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- large pinch grond cloves
- 3/4 tsp ground mixed spice
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 150 g ground almonds
- 150 g dried mixed fruit
- 65 g softened butter (or margarine)
- 35 ml sunflower oil
- 125 g caster sugar
- 100 g soft brown sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 large egg, lightly beaten
- 1 x 400 g tin haricot beans, drained, rinsed and well mashed/pureed
- 3 eating apples peeled, cored and finely chopped
Method
Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C fan oven)/gas 5
You will need a greased and lined springform tin measuring 23 cm across.
Sift the flour, spices, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a large bowl. Add the ground almonds and dried mixed fruit to the flour and spice mixture and stir well.
In a separate bowl beat the butter, oil and both sugars until light and creamy. Add the vanilla extract and stir well.
Add a tablespoon of the spiced flour mixture to the lightly beaten egg and gradually add this to the creamed butter, oil and sugar mixing well as you go. Stir the pureed haricot beans into the cake mixture at this point taking care to make sure all the ingredients are combined well.
Add the chopped apples to the creamed butter and bean mix followed by the flour. Fold all the ingredients together thoroughly.
Transfer the cake mixture to the prepared tin and smooth the surface with a palette knife or the back of a tablespoon.
Bake the cake for 45 - 55 mins until golden brown and a skewer comes out clean.
Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin then turn out by inverting onto a plate. Wrap the cake in tin foil.
The cake is best eaten the next day.
Lisa is making her cake look beautiful by sprinkling with vanilla sugar
PS. besides Lisa and Natasha there are other people that make Toast House very special. One of them is Georgie and we can't finish a post without a picture of her. Oops it is a little out of focus but you get the idea about how lovely she is too.
Toast House is open every Tuesday - Friday / 9 am - 4.30 pm and every Saturday 9 am - 5.00 pm.