It’s a cheerful moment at the start of a much-loved story…
“[Bilbo] had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he—as the host: he knew his duty and stuck to it, however painful—he might have to go without.
“‘Come along in, and have some tea!’ he managed to say after taking a deep breath.
“‘A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir,’ said Balin with the white beard. ‘But I don’t mind some cake—seed-cake, if you have any.’
“‘Lots!’ Bilbo found himself answering, to his surprise; and he found himself scuttling off, too, to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and then to a pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel.”
And there you have it. Clue-finder and web-cutter, friend of bears and guest of eagles, Ringwinner, luckwearer, barrel-rider: Bilbo Baggins bakes, too. Here is the all-round hero in potentia, waiting for the Call… but with one eye on the oven timer. (And the appetite obviously heroic, as well. Only a hobbit would consider two whole seedcakes “a morsel”.)
…It’s been hanging about in British children’s literature for a while now, the seed cake. The appearance in The Hobbit is hardly the first one: seed cake turns up as comfort food often enough, sometimes in strange disguises (the reference in Winnie the Pooh to “crustimoney proseedcake” is one of these).
This recipe goes back to New Year’s Day of 2013, when I apparently woke up with a serious yen for seedcake, and went off to check what recipes were to be found.
There were then a fair number of seed cake recipes online, as the delicacy seemed to be having a mini-renaissance due to people rereading The Hobbit in the wake of the film, or in prep for it. And though we’ve had a recipe for something similar over at the Real Irish Desserts site for a while now, that one’s more along toward the Irish-influenced “tea bread” end of the spectrum due to the chopped candied fruit in it.
So I checked the classic recipe from Mrs. Beeton, had a look at Delia and Nigel Slater, and then wandered about a little bit more to assess a few others takes on the theme.
The recipe that looked best to me was this one over at the HobbitsSecondBreakfast site (now long gone, alas: the link comes via the WayBack Machine). …And typically, once I started working with it I started to adjust it. The changes are fairly significant, so I changed the recipe’s name a bit to signal this.
(And a side note here: an ETA dated 26 April 2024 tells me that I added measurements for a larger (and possibly more Hobbit-sized) bake suitable for a full-sized US bread loaf pan, or a UK 2-pound loaf tin. (EU 2-liter tin.)
Meanwhile, see the center tab above for some of the history of this cake, and the right-hand tab for our recipe.
(Please also note that if/when you buy cookware from links here, we get a little commission on the sale… which goes into keeping the site running.)
As you might expect, there’s some discussion (and some confusion) about where this recipe originally came from, and even about what its name means.
Its origin, fortunately, isn’t too hard to track down. The earliest versions of it start turning up in the late 1500s. Possibly the earliest written mention comes from the 1573 Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, by the poet Tomas Tusser:
Wife sometime this weeke, if the weather hold clere,
an end of wheat sowing, we make for this yere.
Remember you therfore, though I Do it not:
The seede Cake, the Pasties, and Furmenty pot.
Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswifes Jewell from 1596 seems to be the first to specifically give a recipe for a cake with caraway seeds, prepared with butter, eggs, and flour. Similar recipes soon became very popular in Lincolnshire and neighboring English counties, and started turning up in handwritten “great house” cookbooks of the following century.
At some point seedcake started turning up in Ireland as well, where it was often referred to as “Carv(e)y cake”, off the herb’s casual name (itself derived from the Latin carvi, now part of its botanical name). (But since Ireland was where the Latin language was preserved by local and traveling scholars for centuries after the Empire fell, this is probably no surprise.)
There are some food writers who feel that “seed cake” is a reference to the Biblically-mentioned “seed time”: but some of them also get seed time (which is when sowing happens) mixed up with harvest, and draw the conclusion that the cake’s associated with autumn. If there’s any time when making the cake would have been more common, though, it would have been in spring, when the cows with new calves were back in milk, and there was enough butter available that it didn’t have to be hoarded for other, more vital uses.
Other food writers, seeing that caraway quickly became associated with the cake, seem to have gotten the idea that seed cake had to have been a festive cake because of the presence of spices that (they think) ought to have made it expensive. This error is possibly understandable. We tend to think of spices as having been difficult to source in post-medieval times, and often very pricey due to the great distances some of them had to be brought. But the truth is that caraway grows enthusiastically in the northern European climate, and was referred to by some writers as a “cheap peasant spice”—cheap enough that people liked to candy the seeds, and use the resultant crushed caraway “comfits” in cake.
In its earliest incarnations, seed cake was leavened with the same kind of wet yeast or “barm” as was used to raise bread or make beer. Later, when chemical leavening got cheap enough to become readily available, bicarbonate of soda (or baking powder) was routinely swapped in to produce a lighter-textured cake.
Recipes for seed-cake continued popping up all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with assorted variations (such as the addition of almond and other nut flours to help keep it moist, or separately-beaten egg whites to lighten the cake further). Like many dessert breads, though, seedcake’s popularity eventually started to run its course. It started to be seen as a casual country dish, or something cheap and sweet to feed the children: and finally it dropped out of fashion in the early and mid-twentieth century.
But some people (for example, Tolkien) still remembered it with affection. Late in the century, cooks like Delia Smith and Nigel Slater rediscovered it… so it still now turns up as a tea cake, here and there: or in a “Madeira Cake” version, with sweet wine poured over it after baking and allowed to soak in.
Preheat oven to 180°C / 350°F.
Butter, and ideally line with buttered greaseproof paper / baking parchment, a one-pound loaf pan / tin. (ETA: Do the same for a 2-pound loaf pan if you’re using one. Or, for a more Bilbo-like result—specifically a round seedcake—give the same treatment to the bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan.)
(For reference purposes: the baking “pan” I’m using for this is an Emile Henry ceramic bread baker with a volume of about 1.3 liters.)
Since this is a fairly tender cake—even when it’s completely cooled—I tend to line the buttered baking dish with a double “sling” of baking parchment. This ensures you’ll get the cake out in one piece. Normally I do the long-way sling first—
—and then the short-way one.
…Sift together (or just stir together, if you couldn’t be arsed) the flour, baking powder, cream of tartar if used, and salt.
Get out the electric mixer and cream together the softened butter and sugar until light and fluffy. If you can’t wait that long, cream them together until you can no longer feel granularity in the mixture when a little is rubbed between finger and thumb. (Do not do this so many times that people start suspecting you’re only testing the consistency because you really like eating just-butter-and-sugar.)
Add the eggs one at a time to this mixture, and after each one is added, beat like crazy. At the end of this process, add the vanilla extract and lemon zest.
Slow the mixer down and add in the flour mixture tablespoonful by tablespoonful until about half of it is gone. Add the milk. Then continue slowly adding the rest of the flour. Don’t overbeat this, or beat it at too high a speed. Just mix gently until combined.
Finally, slow the mixer to a crawl and stir in the caraway (or other) seeds. (If you like a more pronounced caraway flavor, use a mortar and pestle or other grinding device to grind down about a third of your caraway seeds.)
With a spatula, fill the loaf pan / loaf tin / springform pan with the mixture. Smooth the top a little. Use a knife (or the spatula if it’s sharp-edged enough) to draw a line down the center the long way. (This really does work a little the way it does with bread, to make a path-of-least-resistance for the cake to rise along.)
Bake a loaf-pan seedcake for 50-60 minutes, depending on the size of the pan: a round springform seedcake for 35-40 minutes. (If baking in a large loaf pan, bake for 90 minutes.)
Test for doneness. A skewer should come up almost entirely dry. A few crumbs sticking to it are OK.
When done, remove the cake from the oven and let it sit in the tin for at least another ten minutes. (The image below is from an earlier bake. You can see how the cake sometimes takes advantage of that groove drawn in the dough.)
Then remove the seedcake from its baking container and stand it on a wire rack to cool.
When completely cooled, slice and serve.
This cake toasts brilliantly, by the way. Be careful of your toasting temperatures, as the sugar makes it likely to scorch if the temperature’s too high. Also, it’s better done under a grill than in a toaster, as it may fall apart when removed.
If expecting dwarves: make about six more.
They”ll be listed here, bear with us
Stuff we’ve seen and found interesting, things we want, things you might want, who knows…?
Other people’s recipes that have worked really well
