CHERRY, CHOCOLATE & PISTACHIO ECCLES CAKES

A twist on the classic, fruit filled English pastry.

Happy Friday & welcome back to another newsletter!

This week, we’re making a batch of Eccles cakes. These aren’t your regular Eccles cakes though, as they’re filled with dried cherries, chunks of dark chocolate & toasted pistachios! There’s extra dried fruit in there as well, along with some really good vanilla, almond extract, orange, brown sugar & a few different spices. They’re sweet, sticky & packed full of flavour. Picture gooey chocolate, a lightly spiced fruit filling with notes of caramel, crunchy sugar & the flakiest of pastries…

If you’ve never had an Eccles cake before, you’re missing out, they’re an English classic! Here, flaky laminated pastry is filled with a sticky, lightly spiced dried fruit filling then topped with crunchy demerara sugar and baked until golden.

These pastries originate from Lancashire, in the North West of England and are easily one of my favourites! Now, these aren’t entirely traditional but they sure do taste good. You really can’t go wrong with some buttery, flaky pastry and a rich chocolate, fruit & nut filling. Although, if you’d like a traditional Eccles cake recipe, I have one over on my blog.

I do hope you enjoy this recipe, it’s an absolute belter!

Ben.

The Pastry

If you want to make the absolute best Eccles cakes, you’ll need to make your own pastry. In this case, we’re using rough puff.

This is similar to puff pastry but a whole lot quicker & easier to make! Here, we’re incorporating the butter into the pastry in smaller pieces (grated & chopped) as appose to laminating a large block.

The resulting pastry isn’t as refined as puff pastry but it’s still incredibly flaky and is perfect for things like Eccles cakes, tarte tatins & pastry topped pies. To get the most out of this pastry, I’d recommend chilling the Eccles cakes for at least an hour before baking them in a super hot oven. This is how we achieve optimum flakiness!

Just a note; it’s best to make this pastry the day before you need it, so that it has plenty of time to chill. But if you’re short on time, you can use a block of shop bought puff pastry instead.

The Filling

Traditional Eccles cakes are filled with a mix of currants, raisins, several different spices, citrus zests, brown sugar & butter. So this is what we’re using as the base for these ones.

On top of all the classic components, we’re also going to be adding in a generous amount of dried cherries, chunks of dark chocolate & a handful of toasted pistachios. There’s some almond extract & vanilla paste in the mix as well, which complement the other ingredients perfectly!

When it comes to making these Eccles cakes, I like to shape the filling into a thick disc as appose to just spooning it on top of the pastry. This way, you get a more deep filled pastry with a more uniform shape. This does require chilling the filling for an hour or so before using it but it’s definitely worth it.