My husband finds the name of this cake hilarious. I cannot explain why.

He does, however, still love to eat it, usually slathered in butter. It’s a basic tea-leaf, but it’s always been bunloaf in my family. It’s the cake that my grandmother and mother always made, and one that my Mum, the lactose intolerant, can still eat. It’s so very easy that, as I prepared to pour the mixture into the loaf tin, the daughter said, “Is that it? Mummy, don’t we need to add some more ingredients?” It’s the one cake I pretty much always have the ingredients in stock for, the one cake I can make from memory, and the one cake I’m happy to make first thing in the morning, while still on my first cup of tea.

And this is how you make it:

Bunloaf

Ingredients

2 cups of mixed dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, currants, peel etc)

1 cup of Demerara sugar

1 cup of hot, strained black tea

2 cups of self raising flour

1 egg

some Glace cherries, if you like

Method

Put the fruit and sugar in a large bowl, then pour the tea over, stirring through. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave overnight, or at least for a few hours.

Next day, stir in the sifted flour, egg and cherries.

Pour the mixture into a lined and greased (or silicone and easier) loaf tin, and bake at 160°C for about an hour, or until a cake tester comes out clean. When I made this yesterday, it made one 1lb loaf, and four mini loaves:

If you’re wondering where the fourth mini loaf went, the daughter ate it as soon as it came out of the oven, before I could even get the camera out. This may be a recurring problem with cake photos…