Wishing for Welsh magic: Baker tries to recapture sweetness of family trip

Our family has just returned from a three-week sojourn in Great Britain, so I’ve got a bit of reality whiplash. One day I woke up in a tiny Welsh village that’s straight out of a fairy tale and then, boom, a dozen hours later I’m going to bed in Washougal. This place-switching happened so fast, my brain can hardly make sense of it. All the things we did on our travels have taken on the gauzy quality of a daydream.

For our first week, we stayed in a little stone cottage on a working sheep farm in Pantygelli, Wales, a place so small that I’m not sure it could even be called a village, since it seemed to consist entirely of the sheep farm and one pub. When we finally arrived after the nine-hour flight and four-hour journey by bus and taxi, we were nearly asleep on our feet but couldn’t miss our customary end-of-day cuppa (the charming British shorthand for “cup of tea”). I set the kettle to boil and noticed that our hosts had left us a packet of flat round pastries that I couldn’t identify. Each little cake was pale golden on the top and bottom and studded with blackcurrants. Since I urgently needed a little smackerel of something to eat with my tea, I opened the package and took a bite. It was surprisingly light, just the right amount of sweet, and practically melted in my mouth. It was like a scone yet totally unlike a scone. It was sort of a scone and sort of a cookie. I may be stating the obvious here, but that’s a scookie.

This was my introduction to the Welsh cake, which can be found pretty much anywhere there are Welsh people. Opinions vary — some, like my father-in-law, think they’re rather floury — but the Welsh eat them by the bucketload, warm and fresh from almost every bakery or purchased in packets from the grocery store.

I wanted to bake this myself to see if I could approximate the distinctly Welsh treat I’d come to appreciate. The trouble is, the recipe calls for things not normally available in American grocery stores, like mace (a spice), dried blackcurrants and caster sugar (sometimes sold in the United States as “superfine sugar,” with a texture halfway between granulated sugar and powdered sugar). Welsh cakes are also made with lard and not butter, though that was easy to find in the baking aisle.

I’ve never made a single thing with lard, although I’ve probably eaten a biscuit or pie crust containing this semi-solid white animal fat. Lard kind of grosses me out, to be honest. Also I just don’t like the word “lard.” Why can’t it be called pig butter? Or putter? (I tell you what, if I were in charge of the English dictionary, it would contain many more useful and descriptive words, like blicker, rumscuttle and vlerg. I don’t know what any of them mean but you can look them up in my dictionary.)

I gave my cakes a Northwest twist by substituting dried blueberries for blackcurrants. I made my own caster sugar by grinding white sugar in my coffee grinder. I replaced mace with nutmeg. And I don’t have a griddle — on which Welsh cakes are cooked like pancakes — but I do have my grandmother’s big cast-iron skillet.

The recipe is pretty straightforward and similar to biscuits. First, sift 2 cups flour, ¹/3 cup caster or superfine sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, ¼ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon each nutmeg and cinnamon into a bowl. Mix in 4 tablespoons of cold lard and half a stick of cold butter until the mixture has a coarse crumb texture. Add ½ cup dried blueberries and one beaten egg and work them into the mixture, adding milk in drizzles until the dough is soft but not wet or sticky. Wrap the dough and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

On a floured surface, roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick. Cut rounds using a biscuit cutter. Form the scraps into a ball, roll out the dough and cut again. Repeat until the dough is gone. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter over medium heat on a griddle or iron skillet. Cook the cakes on each side 3 to 4 minutes or until a pale golden brown. Work in small batches, adding more butter when necessary. While the cakes are still warm, toss them in sugar and serve immediately.

Dear reader, do you think I was successful in my Welsh cake-making endeavors? No, I was not. I didn’t roll them thin enough. What I made were blueberry hockey pucks, heavy and raw in the middle and totally inedible. Or maybe the secret ingredient is Welsh magic, straight from the land of 600 castles, misty hills and a fierce red dragon, which is the symbol of Wales.

On our last day in Wales, I savored a warm Welsh cake with a cup of tea. I sat with my daughter and sister-in-law at Bean & Bread, a popular coffee shop and bakery in the town of Abergavenny. (Yes, I know it was a coffee shop and not a tea shop, but there’s no cafe in the British Isles where you can’t get a cup of tea. And when I say “tea,” I obviously mean tea with milk, the way it’s supposed to be served.) My heart cracked a little at our imminent parting. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I’d soon be nearly 5,000 miles away from my beloved Welsh cakes.

I jest, of course, but at that moment the humble Welsh cake seemed to represent everything I’d miss so much: the comforting warmth and sweetness of my English family, who for 30 years have embraced me as their own daughter and sister. You can imagine how happy I was to return to Washington and find, tucked into bag, a napkin-wrapped Welsh cake that I’d forgotten about. I put on the kettle, popped the cake into a toaster and savored a final taste of an unforgettable trip.