Selby Cake (Tart)

When we were kids the family lived on a small farm that my grandfather Forrester bought in about 1912 when he retired. My mother was born eight years later when her father would have been sixty six, going on sixty seven so I never met him. In nineteen fifty six, though, we moved back to the farm. (For a number of reasons. In the first place, my father had decided to give up work and go full-time preaching so he was going to be away a lot. Secondly, mum’s brother Archie had married and, with two small children, they had built a house elsewhere and were moving away from the farm so my granny and my two maiden aunts would be on their own and, thirdly, mum was pregnant with my brother, Steve.)

The result is that we were now a core household of Granny, Aunts Alice and Hilda, Mum, Dad (most of the time, actually) and us kids.

It was a baking household and the Selby Cake was one of Auntie Alice’s regular standby recipes. If visitors were expected she’d bake a Selby Cake. If something was needed for a church evening, Selby Cake. If we were going to visit friends and a cake was required then a Selby Cake was always in order.

I never knew the origin of the name. My father often teased Auntie Hilda about an admirer called Michael Selby and perhaps he gave them the recipe. Nowadays I wonder if the name comes from the town of Selby in Yorkshire. There are a couple of recipes for Selby Tart on the internet and, although they do seem to be more tart than the cake that Auntie Alice used to bake, she always added some sort of parenthetical ‘(tart)’ to the name when she talked about it and her recipe (in the Baptist Women’s Association book of Budget-beating, Well-proven, Appetising Recipes, Port Shepstone Baptist Church 1981) is for ‘Selby Cake (Tart)’.

Selby Cake (Tart)
125g butter
1 well-beaten egg
125g sugar
400g flour
5ml Baking Powder
3ml salt
40ml Jam

Cream the butter and sugar. Add egg. Sift in flour, salt and baking powder. Reserve about a quarter of the mixture and spread the rest in a greased, floured 23cm pan. Spread the jam evenly and then cover the top with flakes of dough (squeeze them out between thumb and forefinger) so that they touch but don’t join.
Bake for 30 minutes at 180˚C (350˚F) Gas Mark 4

Notes

Auntie Alice’s original recipe gave no guidance on how much dough to leave for the covering and I left too little. I think a quarter should do but I left less and actually had to excavate a hole in the cake to get some more after the jam was on.

The quantity of jam was also not specified and I think I used about 40 ml, but it needs a thickish layer and you may need to adjust that as well.

You can find alternative recipes for Selby Tart at http://whatsforsupper-juno.blogspot.com/2009/11/vals-apple-and-apricot-selby-tart-with.html and Recipe Curio : http://recipecurio.com/selby-tart-recipe-typed-sheet/