A Cake Worthy of Barbara Pym

Three pals and I gathered for afternoon tea last week, and I don't know if you have to have had an English mother or to be an avid fan of the novelist Barbara Pym to appreciate it the way I did, but it was a highly pleasurable experience.

Valerie, one of the pals and English herself, made a Walnut Cake based on a 1939 recipe served at Fuller's Tea Rooms in London, now lost to time. She found the recipe in the Sunday Times of London some years ago, recreated by Shona Poole, who had eaten the original.

Poole says, "it was the high quality of the three layers of walnut-studded sponge, sandwiched between vanilla butter cream and covered with a thick layer of white icing, which put it above reproach."

Val carried the cake from the car in a small plastic milk crate. The rest of us held our breath. We'd been hearing about this cake for months and had more or less browbeaten Val into making it for us. The cake looked unpretentious, smallish in diameter, yellow, with a translucent white icing. Yum. Our hostess had provided pretty painted tea mugs and plates and a small centerpiece of garden flowers. We sat down. Val cut four generous pieces, about half the cake.

Forget the kind of cake you see on Betty Crocker boxes, with inches of shiny frosting between overblown layers. This cake was dense (a fine crumb, to you bakers?), with a very thin layer of butter frosting between cake layers. The cake itself tasted very egg-y and intensely sweet. The boiled icing poured over the outside had the slightest crunch to it.

You could picture this cake on a low table in front of the fire, with mother pouring out strong black tea. Better yet, being produced by one of Barbara Pym's characters, possibly the pair of sisters in "Less Than Angels," who provide comforting teas for the often upset and bewildered younger people in the novel. The sisters sometimes put their feet up and listened to the wireless after tea, but only after the washing up was done.

Val has kindly typed out the recipe and I am happy to pass it on, if requested. There are no tricks up the sleeve of this cake, just straightforward ingredients and a fair amount of work.