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?

Does anyone know a bakery that still sells Lardy cakes? If so where please please please?! I think I’d be willing to drive for several hours to buy one! I often dream of the ones I had in my childhood!

Does anyone remember a “melting moment”? We used to have them as a pudding at school. Bloody lovely!

M&S Eccles cakes are amazing!
Very rich, very buttery, not too sweet.

I’m in Gloucestershire. We have Lardy cakes in bakeries here. There’s a chain called Jane’s bakeries that definitely sell them.

Sticky Willy - an iced bun. Not sure if that is just our family name.I had the M&S ones but they aren’t the same.
Gyosy tart and a slice of apple
My aunty worked at a bakers in Eastbourne in the 70s/80s and the cakes were glorious.

Thanks!

I own a coffeeshop where we bake all our own sweets and savouries...we do a roaring trade in cheesecake and brownies/cookie pies etc but we also sell peach melbas, Sly Cake, Bakewell, custard tarts, eclairs, coconut Macaroons, swiss rolls, something for everyone really!

Aldi sell London cheesecakes and M&S sell pineapple tarts.

London cheesecake.
Sometimes available in Aldi.

Cross posted. Great minds!

Will have to make a trip to Aldi this week for said London cheesecakes now. Absolute bliss.

Fisher and Donaldson was the aspirational cake/chocolate shop when I was at university in the area in the 1980s. Last year I took my husband on a trip to visit my misspent youth and was delighted to find that Fisher and Donaldson was still going strong and some of the fancy bites were exactly the same as I remembered.

On the other side of Scotland, Browning's does a good range of traditional Scottish cakes and biscuits.

Paris buns and jammy Paris buns available in my local shops

Various recipes here - eg Gypsy Tart - from a very well-reviewed book. I have the opposite of a sweet tooth and hated school dinners but my DH is very enthusiastic about some of her recipes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/School-Dinners-Recipes-Old-1960s/dp/1723086290

For non Amazoners: Sally Berry "School Dinner Recipes" published 2018
ISBNs here: ISBN-10 : 172308629 /ISBN-13 : 978-1723086298

I used to work in the city of London and am still nostalgic for the most fantastic salty caraway seed bread sold by a Jewish bakery on a corner not far from the (old) Liverpool Street station entrance. All that area has been vastly redeveloped since the 1980s, but it was some of the very best bread I have ever tasted. There were queues of city gents all down the street every lunchtime waiting for filled poppy seed rolls - but I think the caraway seed bread was even better. We used to eat it - of an evening - with red wine and salted butter as an appetiser. But really, one could have made a whole meal of it.

Sorry to derail the thread.

Back to sweet things, I also remember Japp Cakes - two little disks of meringue sandwiched together with coffee cream stuff - not as rich as real butter cream - and coated with chopped hazlenuts and topped with a dab of coffee water icing. I didn't use to eat them, but I wonder what happened to them?

I really miss an old-fashioned doughnut. My Mum used to get me one from Bewleys as a treat after buying school uniform, I think it was a treat for her as she needed a strong tea and a sugar rush after the ordeal. It was almost spherical, coated in crunchy granulated sugar and had proper raspberry jam, the sort that actually had raspberries in it. I really dislike the modern style of glazed doughnuts.

I know this is a thread about where to buy these cakes but if you fancy baking them the BE-RO cookbook is brilliant . You can often find older versions in charity shops.

I worked in one of these bakeries as a Saturday job, this takes me back

They Did a sort of forerunner to a cupcakes it was a Madeira cake in a muffin case. Swirled with a chocolate butter cream, then dipped in chocolate. Used to buy one for my break

I also miss frog cakes. I think they are an Australia thing really, but the shop opposite the maternity hospital where mum had my younger sisters did them (in Sussex) and I had one if I was good at her appointments

Oooh, Gypsy tart! I'm an exile from Kent and I remember the school dinner ones so well. I didn’t know you could still get them in a supermarket.
The last time I had any that I didn’t make myself was when we had lunch at the Yew Tree in Westbere, near Canterbury.

We have a coffee shop bakers in the small town near us, which has proper old fashioned cakes, made by the proprietor. Her Butterfly cakes, with wonderful vanilla buttercream, are superb.

I think they were Austrian not Polish but forget!

Polish doughnuts are amazing. They do flavours like sweetened cream cheese with icing and coconut on top and plum filled ones.

50 years ago the village I lived in had a local bakery run by two elderly brothers who made specific cakes on different days. The vanilla slices were to die for, pastry crisp and flaky not soggy like the ones you get in supermarkets and Chelsea buns🤤🤤🤤

If you have a Wenzel's chain near you they do nice Swiss buns and Belgian buns, and pretty good jam doughnuts.
When we go to MIL's in NI however, we hit the bakeries hard (there are at least 5 in the town), not just for the cakes (anything with jam and coconut suits me - although I'm not a fan of the sweet cream they mostly use) but of course the 100 different sorts of bread!

I'm with you on the OTT cakes covered in extra biscuits/chocolates/sweets and shit OP. I feel the same about all the 'loaded' burgers and fries etc, why add a load of cream/bacon/cheese/fried onions etc to a perfectly decent meal?!

I'm not sure about really old fashioned cakes but my mum is really into baking (don't think I've ever been round and they haven't got some freshly baked cake available!) and these are some of my favourites that she's been baking since I was small (now late 30s).

• moist ginger cake
• Victoria sponge (preferably with cream and jam in the middle rather than buttercream)
• banana cake or carrot cake with a cream cheese and icing sugar topping
• Bakewell tart
• not sure what it's called, but a moist coconut cake smothered in raspberry jam then covered in desiccated coconut- it's lovely 😍
• lemon drizzle cake
• chocolate cake with cream filling and ganache
• fairy cakes and butterfly cakes
• homemade apple pie with cream

I also love a good custard slice but it has to be from a proper Baker (sadly my mum never quite perfected this 😅 and Tesco versions are crap!).

In terms of savoury food, I love a good scotch egg but I can't make them myself and again, supermarket versions are generally dry and rubbish so it has to come from a good deli or bakes. Likewise pasties.

@Jennalong I was brought up in Wiltshire and loved lardy cake from Reeve the baker.

Oh a Russian slice. I loved them.

@Talipesmum I love that photo! You are so lucky to have this bakery, cherish it.
I have to go all the way to East Kent now to get my fix. (A cream slice with synthetic cream, Jam and icing!) It's such a shame that all these cakes are so difficult to find now. Independent Bakeries that have been bought out by the big boys, namely the monster that is Greggs which can hardly be called a Bakery.