Eccles cakes

Rich and sweet, these pastries from Lancashire have been bestsellers for more than 200 years

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There is a story that in the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell banned Eccles cakes on the grounds that they were too indulgent: all of that melting pastry and expensive dried fruit, sugar and spice deemed sacrilegious in Puritan England. Sadly, it is a myth; Eccles cakes weren't invented until the late 18th century, slap-bang in the middle of the ostentatious Georgian era, their only religious association being that they were a popular offering at a funeral tea.

The first commercial bakery to sell them was opened in Eccles, near Manchester, in 1796 by a baker called James Birch. These were traybakes; the filling sandwiched between enriched pastry and cut into squares. A few years later, William Bradby opened a competing bakery over the road. At their peak, Birch was selling 5,000 a day and Bradby a whopping 8,000.

The first printed recipe for an Eccles cake dates to 1845, where it instructs us to roll out one large plate-sized round. By the 1890s, recipes begin to appear for the familiar form we know and love today.

How to make them

You haven't tasted an Eccles cake until you've made one yourself. You don't need to make your own pastry, shop-bought is perfectly acceptable, but make sure it's an all-butter one that contains no hydrogenated fats.

Makes 8