By the power of Thor!

Every month, thanks to my mother-in-law, I get a copy of +BBC Good Food though the door. It's great, generally comes as a surprise because I'm not paying attention to the date and I get to spend the evening planning new foods to try. But very occasionally, three times in fact, I've bought Delicious. I've not made anything from them, but they seem very well put together and have some interesting features, one of which is "save our heritage" recipes that are at risk of dying out because they are no longer fashionable. Interesting idea, and the recipe in the issue I bought was Singing Hinny's (very much like a drop scone, or welsh piklet). At the bottom of the page though was the advert for the following issue: Thor cake.

Now, I love the Norse gods as much as the next person (ok, probably a bit more than the next person) but I wasn't going to buy another issue of quite an expensive magazine just for one recipe, not when there is the whole of the internet to provide me with what I want. So here it is.

Thor Cake

225g porridge oats (or oatmeal)
225g self-raising flour
225g brown sugar (bit vague, I used dark brown sugar)
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp salt
½ tsp ground allspice
50g candied peel
225g butter
175g black treacle

I was a bit worried when I saw all spice, I had bought some a while ago (can't remember for what) but I'd never gotten around to using it. I did wonder if this had been a mix up and it was mixed spice that was actually required, but I stuck it in and it really does smell right (my house currently smells amazing).

Also, a note on measuring the treacle. I can't remember where I read about this but it's always good to share tips. My treacle came in a tin, cute, oldy-worldy but a pain in the arse to measure. So what I do is put the open tin on my scales (this will only work for digital scales), set it to zero and then started removing spoonfuls of treacle. As the tin gets lighter, it reads the weight you've removed in minus grams! Amazing.

In my usual "just chuck it in" kind of way of doing things, I didn't have candied peel. What I did have though was about 30g of mixed dried fruit and some raisins, which I decided would do instead.

So Step 1 Mix all the dried ingredients. Easy peasy. Also preheat oven to 190C.  And grease/line a loaf tin.

Step 2 Over a low heat melt butter and treacle in a saucepan.

Step 3 Mix butter/treacle into dry ingredients. Mix like crazy. The recipe I followed said "Now stir with all your might with a wooden spoon until you get a thick, loose dough-like mixture." Now, I thought that might mean 'loose' as in fluid, but having mixed, probably means 'loose' like 'not tightly packed'.

 Tip this mix into the loaf tin and cook for 40-45 minutes, use your judgement, mine's been cooking for 50 minutes but at 180C (I thought I might need to reduce for a fan oven, I don't think I needed to) and it's a bit wobbly still so is staying put.

Right, so it's finally out of the oven, possibly slightly burnt on the top, but I think that's my own fault for messing up the oven temperature. I've left it to cool for a bit before cutting a slice, it smells really good and couldn't help myself.

It's such an odd cake, not really a cake, more a beefed up flapjack. The allspice is amazing, definitely have to use it for more things. The sugar/treacle combo give it a really nice toffee flavour as well. Can't wait to try this cold tomorrow, I imagine it's going to become really chewy.

Just as a side note, having become a bit calorie obsessed recently I thought I'd work out how much damage this cake does. The answer: a lot. If this serves 10, then each slice will contain around 470 calories, sending me from doing 'ok' to 'shit, I'm over my daily count by a third'. Nevermind, cake is cake, and although this is much more an autumnal cake than a spring cake, it still goes down very well.