7. Plum Cake

This fabulous recipe is a combination of two very old Scottish ones, both beautifully written in a flowery hand. There is one recipe in an anonymous book from the late seventeenth century which has an elaborate recipe for a ‘plume caike’ starting ‘Take 7 pounds of flower [sic] then take a pynt of creame and two pounds of butter . . .’ It also has 22 eggs in it, so we are not talking small cakes! The other recipe is from Janet Maule’s recipe book from 1701 and calls for ‘a m