Sweet treats for your cariad?
It’s Dydd Santes Dwyenwen/St Dwynwen’s Day tomorrow (a bit like a Welsh Valentine’s Day) so how better to show some love than by baking someone some Welsh cakes, or pice ar y maen. It’s a traditional recipe which couldn’t be easier to make but which always goes down a treat in my house. I’ve made some to take into work with me tomorrow- along with a ginger cake which I just fancied trying out- because we’re holding a joint celebration with Burns’ Night.
To make Welsh cakes you need a heavy, flat griddle (I use one which belonged to my great-grandmother) though a bakestone will do the same job. The you also need the following ingredients:
225g self-raising flour
110g butter (some go half butter and half lard but I save my lard for birds)
85g caster sugar
A handful of raisins (more or less according to taste)
1 medium egg
Milk
Extra butter for greasing
In a mixing bowl, rub together the flour and fat until you have something that looks like crumbs with no lumps of fat showing then stir in the sugar and raisins. Beat your egg then mix it with the dry ingredients to form dough. At this stage, my dough isn’t usually doughy enough, so I add in a tiny bit of milk at a time until I can bind it into a dough that I can roll and work with.
Roll your dough out on a floured surface until it’s about half a centimetre thick and then cut circles out using a cutter. Welsh cakes normally have a frilly edge and though I normally use a cutter which is about 4inches in diameter, this time I will be using one which is 3 1/16th inch (sorry, I can’t type fractions!) because you can make extra cakes that way which is good if you have lots of people eating them and you only have one egg left! Made with a normal sized cutter this recipe makes about 8 cakes.
When your dough is made and your cakes are cut, grease your griddle and fry each cake for two or three minutes on each side until they are golden brown, though they taste fine if they go a little darker.
I like my cakes pretty much straight off the griddle with a cup of tea while they are still hot and buttery, but they will last a few days in an airtight tin. In university, my housemate’s Mamgu made us enough to fill a 5kg cake tin and we lived off those for weeks. They got a little stale but they were fine washed down with tea!
