Have you ever had leftover fruit cake that you are at a loss what to do with? I always make a Christmas cake and end up with heaps leftover, which sits sad and neglected in a dark corner of my cupboard. Given that fruit cake is not cheap to make, you don't want to throw it away. Today, I have one solution for what to do with that stale fruit cake - the Chester Square!
Chester squares are a memory from my childhood. Certain bakeries in my regional hometown made Chester squares, which were pieces of shortcrust pastry filled with a pitch black filling made of treacle and crumbled stale cake, and topped with bright pink buttercream icing. I haven't seen them anywhere else - perhaps making Chester squares is a "country" habit?
Alas, I have not yet found a recipe for Chester squares that gives me the same aesthetic result or quite the same flavour, but I have found an alternative that uses golden syrup. I used this recipe for the pastry and this recipe for the filling, and made it in a 20cm by 30cm slice (bar) tin. Instead of sugaring the top of my Chester squares, I iced them with lemon icing - not quite the pink buttercream of my childhood, but close enough.
The end result, as I mentioned, is not the soft squidgy black cake of my memory, but it is still pretty good. Although it is a bit of a faff to make, it's a great way to serve fruit cake in a different way if it has gone stale or you are just sick of fruit cake.
8 comments:
Fortunately, there's never any leftover fruit cake because my husband loves the stuff. I'd never heard of Chester squares before. I wonder why they are named that?
I had heard of Chester Squares but never had them or even known quite what they were. I am not a big fan of fruit cake but these do look good.
Wowo i love the idea of using left over fruit cakes for making this not that i have left overs here. Looks so good.
Never heard of these. They look tasty!
What a great idea to add some icing to fruit cake to give them new life. Your chester squares look really good.
I am not familiar with the name but I think I know the sort of slice you mean - I am racking my brains to think what it was called when I saw it - actually my mum made a similar one but I don't think it was old fruit cake in it - though I love the idea
I didn't know about the left over cake, I thought it was just fruit, but I loved them. My mum called them sinkers.
I ended up with a recipe from Celtnet.org an English cooking site. Basically I revised it to how they are made in Adelaide South Australia bakeries and almost got the same taste. None the bakeries will give me the recipe even though I can only buy them from 1 bakery now if I don't have any spare stale cake but that's now changed
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