Cornish Saffron Cake

Cornish saffron cake is a distinctive sweet bread of Cornwall, where saffron has been used in baking since the medieval period, when the spice reached the county through its Atlantic trade links with Spain and the Mediterranean. Cornwall's position on the trade routes made saffron more available there than in much of inland England, and the spice coloured and flavoured the rich yeasted fruit loaves baked for feasts and teatime. The cake is a slow-risen enriched dough of flour, butter, milk and eggs, deeply coloured and aromatically flavoured with a strong infusion of saffron, and studded with currants, raisins and chopped citron or candied peel. The closely related saffron bun, smaller and shaped into rounds, is the Cornish 'tea treat bun', baked for Methodist chapel tea meetings in the 19th century. The saffron gives both the colour and a hay-and-honey flavour that defines the bake.

A dense, golden-yellow crumb, fragrant with saffron's hay-and-honey note, sweet and buttery, flecked with currants and chewy citron peel. Eaten in slices with butter, or toasted, with a cup of tea.

The defining technique is the saffron infusion. A generous quantity of saffron threads, more than would be used in savoury cooking, is steeped in hot, just-boiled milk for at least 30 minutes, sometimes overnight, to draw out the maximum colour and the volatile aroma compounds. This golden milk goes into an enriched dough of strong flour, butter, sugar and eggs, risen slowly with yeast, with currants and candied peel folded in. The saffron's carotenoid pigments colour the crumb deep yellow, and its compounds, picrocrocin and safranal, give the hay-honey flavour. The dough is proved twice for a light but close texture, then baked as a round or in a tin at around 180 degrees C. The cake keeps and improves for a few days as the saffron flavour permeates, and is traditionally sliced and buttered.