Eccles Cakes

These cakes have been made for the Eccles Wake for hundreds of years. It is said that their first commercial success came when Mrs Raffald, who was to the eighteenth century what Mrs Beeton was to the nineteenth century, gave her own secret recipe to a favourite servant girl as a wedding present. The girl went to live in the town of Eccles and made and sold the cakes so successfully that she made a fortune for herself and her husband.