Travel photography entry: Moving North

Passport & Plate - Adventurer's seedcakes

United Kingdom | Tuesday, February 3, 2015 | 3 photos

Ingredients

80g soft light brown sugar
1 egg
60ml groundnut oil
100g wholemeal self-raising flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
50g root vegetables: carrot or parsnip
3 tablespoons mixed seeds (sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and poppy seeds make a good mix)

Preheat the oven to 180 degree Celsius.
Begin by mixing the sugar, eggs and oil together until smooth.
Whisk together the flour, bicarb and caraway seeds in another bowl. Add these to the wet ingredients and stir.
Grate the root vegetables with a fine grater or in a food processor. Add these to the mixture along with the milk and mix until combined and dropping off the spoon.
Grease a shallow 12-cup muffin tin with a layer of groundnut oil then dust with flour. Shake the tin so a fine layer of flour covers it, then tip out the excess.
Place a tablespoon of mixture into each cup of the tin. Top each with around half a teaspoon of the seed mix.
Bake for 15 minutes, until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

The story behind this recipe:
When I was little I rarely had a chance to travel abroad. I can’t blame my parents for avoiding packing three squealing girls onto an aeroplane. My friends would arrive home tanned from Portugal and Florida, but we never complained. To us holiday resorts seemed the dullest idea on Earth. Instead, we would wake our parents in the grey, pre-dawn hours of the morning, alight with excitement. The car would be jammed with our suitcases and inordinate numbers of cuddly toys, and we, all elbows and knees, would cram ourselves into the backseat for the long drive West.
Our summers tended to be spent in little hired cottages, miles from civilisation somewhere is southern Wales, where my father grew up. Perhaps it was coming from the rolling hills of Kent, but the rugged and wind-swept coastlines we watched through the car windows seemed to have an air of something magic about them. Our little cottages would inevitably have low, beamed ceilings and a huge, squashy sofa. And always, it would rain. It might not sound like much of a summer, but we three would cuddle up, bleary-eyed and listening to folk tales about the towns and villages around us. My love of these fairy stories is probably the reason The Hobbit had such an impact on my childhood. My love of food is likely the reason I became so obsessed with the mention of seed cakes at the beginning: little delicacies so loved by the dwarves. When I came across a little book of welsh teatime treats from one of those holidays long ago and discovered the recipe for traditional seedcake, it felt as though it was meant to be. So the recipe, recently posted on my food blog - with a few little tweaks because I can’t resist experimenting - really means a lot to me and always puts me in the mind for adventure.