Old fashioned cakes and other bakery items.

[PamperMoose]

I love cakes but I find a lot of cakes now are crammed full of other sweet items like biscuits or covered in them. It’s a bit much for me.

It made me wonder what old fashioned cakes, pastries and savoury bakery items that are hard to find now.

I miss really good gingerbread men. I know that they’re still available if not so readily, but they aren’t as gingery as they used to be. And what’s happened to cream horns.

My Mother used to love something called Paris buns. They’re rather like a scone scattering with sugar nibs. Are those still around?

What old fashioned bakery items do you miss?

I miss Greggs vegetable bake, they were so savoury

Eccles cakes.

I make some half hearted ones if I have spare puff pastry. But the ones we used to get as kids (from the butchers, I think?!) Were amazing.

Don't they make them anymore? You can buy them frozen in Iceland.

I love London cheesecake and they are hardly ever available anywhere. Mind you only one bakery near me sold them when I was a child.

i don't like all these pimped up stuff you get nowadays, brownies with another whole sweet treat on them like a freddo or a mars bar etc. (and i'm not a under eater, i'm fat but they are so big and sugary i cant finish them!) if I wanted a freddo i would have chosen one not a brownie.

you dont really see things like rock cakes, macaroons (not the french macarons), sponge with jam and coconut, fairy cakes with a small amount of icing as opposed to cupcakes with half a tonne of frosting on.

When I was a child bakeries used to sell a cake called Russian Slice, I think it was made with leftover sponge cake plus jam and rum essence, it usually was topped with feather glacé icing. A real taste of my childhood!
Gypsy tart was a popular school lunch pudding, they probably still have it in Kent.

For home made treats I often used to make treacle tart (actually made with golden syrup) or Bakewell tart, but I've not made them for many years now.

I miss the traditional things from Oliver Adams bakery. Lardy cake. Almond macaroons. Also locally we had a doughnut with custard in and fondant icing on the top called custard bumpers. Trouble is, ingredients are different now so it doesn't taste the same.

@Terfosaurus I don't think it's the same one - I'm also not partial to vegan cheese but will double check next time I'm near an Iceland!

I used to live near a bakery that sold big family-sized tarts of all sorts - Manchester, gypsy, cornflake, butterscotch... God I miss those.

I was just going to mention Russian Slice!! I think they were regional but my MIL used to work in a bakery in the East Midlands and would bring these with her when she visited! Lovely lovely stuff - a way of using up stale cake apparently with added alcohol!

I have never seen it for sale anywhere. 😔

Bath buns.

I quite often have cause to take cakes to events for sharing, and good old fashioned bread pudding (not bread & butter pudding) is so popular. Good old slice of nostalgia for people, and good fun to make too.

I used to love a fresh, squidgy iced bun as well. Not a basic finger roll dipped in icing, but a lovely enriched sweet dough one. You just don't see them in bakeries any more.

Apple doughnuts with icing on.

My local cake shop does a mix of
The OTT brownies etc
Her most popular items are jam dots, cornflake tarts, school cake and millionaire shortbread

Growing up in the 80s/90s, if you went out for a cuppa, there was always chocolate tiffin. I never see it available now.

I love Rock cakes, rarely see them now.

I miss being able to buy bridge rolls. A local baker used to make these. Smaller than a finger roll and lovely for buffets

I know this is a thread where people are hoping to find out where to buy these old-fashioned items, but I really do think in most cases learning to bake them (or some of them) might be the only way to avoid the excessively sweet/overdecorated stuff. I made a Dundee cake recently and it was absolutely lovely. I rarely bother to ice cakes so mine are always fairly plain.

Bumpers!
I had almost convinced myself that I had made up the name, and that they were simply called custard doughnuts (despite also having icing on the top).
Thank you.

Even small towns used to have 2 or 3 bakers with windows full of interesting cakes.

You never see Japp cakes, proper custard slices (only the supermarket sort), fruit tarts with a ring of cream piped on the top .......

We have a bakery in our village that sells exclusively this kind of stuff. Not because it’s being nostalgic for traditional British bakes, but because it’s never changed the menu. I don’t think they even sell croissants. It’s all iced fingers, iced donuts (vermicelli sprinkle option , or hundreds and thousands with a smiley face), apple turnovers, various buns with cream and jam in a variety of shapes, treacle tart, custard slice, custard tart, coconut and jam thing, gingerbread men, coconut macaroons, gigantic quite solid florentines, and massive “danish” with glacé cherry.

We would go in there to buy the kids a treat sometimes but honestly those doughnuts are the size of a child’s head.

in fact I’ve just found a photo - here you go!

Living in Wiltshire as a child Lardy Cakes were quite a thing obviously made with and oozing in lard .
Nowadays totally not seen as healthy and probably in todays palate , a bit grim.

From the same place you could also buy faggots hot from the oven ! Them were the days !😀

We have a traditional bakery next door. We had 2 lovely custard slices yesterday. Their Welsh cakes are also amazing

M&S do iced finger buns - both raspberry or lemon. They also have a dollop of jam/curd in them. They are delicious

We have a proper bakery in town that sells all this sort of thing. They do do naice bread as well as proper cottage loaves and similar, but no brownies or very iced cupcakes

There’s a bakery near us that does the long jam doughnuts with a line of fresh cream & jam. And proper Chocolate Eclairs. And Gingerbread Men. And Custard Slices. It’s expensive, though. Last time we ate in, it was £25 for two cups of coffee & cake, and juice for DS. The sort of thing Mum would bring us for when out shopping, as kids.