One from my mum’s recipe collection here. Surprisingly it doesn’t contain any gin, but my mum was forced to pay for the recipe twice: once as a tax payer who paid for the Queen Mother to live as a dole queen, supping gin and gambling away tax payers’ money, and then again to actual get the recipe.

(Small-r) republican rants aside: it is a really good cake. It’s basically date & walnut cake, but the ways it’s made is a bit unusual, and the sticky toffee topping can’t be argued with!

Full recipe can be found, as always, in a handy Google spread sheet! You start by adding bicarbonate of soda to the dried dates, and cover in boiling water.

Then you make a pretty standard cream butter&sugar, fold in flour cake mix, all done in the mixer, then add the dates: water & all, then add chopped walnuts to get your mix.

Line a 20cm square tin. Mum’s recipe said tin foil, but I stick to baking parchment and oil spray.

After 35 mins at 160c fan you’ve got your cake!

Then you make a toffee mix using butter, sugar & milk in a pan on the stove, and cover the cake, then top with walnut halves.

I’ve tried doing the toffe both in and out of the tin, and both are troublesome. In the tin it’s easy to get the mixture on, but impossible to turn the cake out. Turing it out first results in toffee running off the edge and going everywhere. My current system is to remove, cover in toffee, then eats the drippings :D

It now strikes me that maybe the tin foil it so you can cover in toffee then lift out using the tin foil… hmm… maybe mum knows best!