English Pound Cake

Ingredients

• 450 g butter
• 560 g flour
• 450 g caster sugar
• 450 g currants
• 9 eggs
• 60 g candied peel
• 15 g citron peel
• 15 g sweet almonds
• to taste ground mace

Method

creaming|Cream the butter until it's pale and fluffy — roughly five minutes at medium speed with an electric mixer or ten with a wooden spoon and muscle. This incorporates air into the fat, which will anchor the rise of the cake later. Add the caster sugar in thirds, beating well after each addition. The grittiness of the sugar against the butter stretches the fat globules further and traps more air. What you're building is an emulsion; the eggs that follow will stabilise it.

Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating thoroughly between each. The emulsification|emulsifying agents in the yolk — lecithin primarily — bind the water from the eggs to the butter, keeping the mixture smooth and preventing it from separating into greasy pools. Once all yolks are incorporated, sift the flour over the mixture and fold it in gently but decisively. Overmix now and you'll develop gluten, tightening the crumb and dulling the tender texture that defines a proper pound cake.

Toss the currants, candied peel (cut into neat slices about half a centimetre thick), and blanched chopped almonds through the batter. Scatter the ground mace over — a quarter teaspoon if you're cautious, more if you like the peppery warmth it brings. Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks; they should hold shape but still fall slightly when you lift the whisk. Fold them through in two additions to preserve the air you've worked in. This is what lifts the cake; without it, you'd have pound cake, dense and tight.

Line a 20-centimetre round tin (or equivalent volume) with baking paper — bottom and sides — and butter it well. Pour the batter in and smooth the top. Bake at 170°C for two to two and a half hours. The cake is ready when the surface is deep golden-brown, springs back when pressed lightly, and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out with barely a crumb clinging to it. The interior should remain moist and tender; a few wet streaks mean you're overdone.

Cool in the tin for twenty minutes, then turn onto a wire rack. This cake improves over two or three days as the moisture settles evenly through the crumb. Keep it wrapped in greaseproof paper in an airtight container.