Simnel cake with a difference!

Last year I made Simnel cakes with the AJ's as a gift to their granny's, and I thought at the time it would be a lovely tradition to start making one every year at this time even if it was just with Alyssa, especially as it's roots are that it was made for Mother's by their daughters for mother's day.

Now we had a small problem with the marzipan, I am not a huge fan of marzipan, so I am not willing to buy something that I won't really use again.  I know I have seen Simnel cakes made with mini eggs instead of marzipan balls, and after a little bit of research I realised that it's mainly the topping that makes a Simnel cake.  So I found a lovely simple fruit cake recipe, and made the rest up!!

We took in turns adding the ingredients, and in between telling Arthur off constantly for licking spoons, tasting ingredients etc we finally had a finished cake mix. And once we managed to spoon the mix into the cake tin, we were all allowed to have a cheeky spoon lick, I don't mind the children doing this as it is agreeably the best part of baking!!

Whilst the cake was in the oven we rolled out some scraps of ready roll icing that we had from Granny in a lovely sunny yellow colour, and once out of the oven I spread some Apricot jam on top to help the icing stick.  I was very impressed by the restraint shown by the children with the chocolate eggs, I bought 20 eggs from the pick and mix counter expecting a couple to be eaten before they made it onto the cake, but they didn't even try to eat them, so I treated them with a couple of eggs each!

We then had the difficult task of waiting till after dinner until we were allowed to eat it, and it certainly was yummy!! I will definitely make this again, but maybe add more milk as it was very crumbly, I added more than the amount stated anyway but it obviously needed a bit more.

Taking turns adding ingredients

Watching the cake in the oven

Rolling..

Rolling...

Not perfectly arranged, but awesome all the same!!