Return to Main Recipes Page/Return to Home Page
7 eggs, separated
Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Put sifted flour in a bowl and add sugar, mixing lightly with a fork. Make a well and add yolks, oil, water, vanilla essence and almond essence. Mix well.
Beat egg whites until stiff with a pinch of salt and a pinch of cream of tartar. Add egg whites to yolk mixture and mix slowly with a metal spoon until well combined.
Place in an ungreased tube cake tin and sprinkle with cherries and walnuts before placing into the preheated oven. Knife the mixture a few times if you like, but I like to leave the cherries and walnuts on top.
Bake for 1-1/2 hours, or when a skewer placed into the center of the cake comes out clean.
Invert onto a bottle or cans to cool, then carefully remove from tin. Dust top lightly with icing sugar before serving. This cake freezes well.
Poster's Notes:
Sarah prepared this cake for the breaking of the fast. I too make it every Yom Kippur. We traditionally break our fast with it every year.
Baking this cake allows me time to reflect on the impact Sarah had on my life as a teenager, growing up in Perth, without my parents who lived at that time in Singapore, and who had placed me in a Perth boarding school. Every Yom Tov, Sarah ensured that there was place for me at her table alongside her family. I loved spending time with her in the kitchen watching her cook, and I think of her often.
Every Yom Kippur I bake this cake for my family, and reflect, remembering with great fondness and gratitude this kind lady who taught me so very much about what it means to accept with grace and dignity, the good and bad that life deals to us all. Her thoughts and devotion were always of her family and helping those of the community who were not so fortunate. I am hopeful that there will be many readers who will remember her.
Posted by Ruth Saddick
Nutritional Info Per Serving: N/A
100g red glace cherries cut into quarters and sprinkled lightly with flour (to stop them from falling into the mixture)
100g roughly chopped walnuts, sprinkled with flour
2-1/4 cups self rising flour, sifted twice
1-1/2 cups castor sugar
Pinch of salt
Pinch of cream of tartar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tsp. vanilla essence
1 tsp. almond essence
3/4 cup lukewarm water
Sarah was a close friend of my mother's. She spent endless hours in the kitchen, often waking at 4:00am to prepare cakes, biscuits, tarts, strudel, along with home made lokchen and kreplach, chicken soup, and kugel. Many of her recipes have been lost, but because of my mother's shared passion for cooking with her friend, several have thankfully been retained by my mum. This is one of them.