Sussex tea: dip into a toffee-rich pond cake

Add a little southern sunshine to you cricket tea with this rich, lemon-enriched variant of Sussex pond pudding, says Xanthe Clay

“Sussex is a side which is full of the warm South.” So wrote the finest of all cricket essayists, Neville Cardus, in 1929. “They play, surely, tawny cricket that has lived much in the sun.”

The Sussex player who epitomised this was Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji. Nicknamed “Smith” at Cambridge, where he earned a Blue, even though he had never played a formal cricket match before going up, he was generally known as Ranji.

He first played for Sussex at Lord’s in 1895, aged 22, and went on to revolutionise batting with his dazzling style. Ranji, wrote Cardus, was “all fluttering curves” and in his hands the bat was “a wizard’s wand”.

His career ended when his responsibilities at home in India took over – the day job was as Maharajah Jam Saheb of Nawanag – and Cardus summed up his departure. “When Ranji passed out of cricket, a wonder and a glory departed from the game forever.”

I’ve captured the magic of Sussex pond pudding in a cake, studded with nuggets of whole lemon and topped with rubber ducks a toffee pond

Sussex is also home to one of the best British puds of all, Sussex pond pudding, which is another happy blend of the home-grown and the visitor.

A suet crust, the proper basis for a proper British pudding, is stuffed with butter, sugar and a whole lemon. Cut into the pudding, and out gushes a river of lemony, toffee-ish syrup: this is the pond.

The magic is in the whole lemon, the faint bitterness and intense sharpness of which balances the sweet sauce and rich crust delectably. So comforting, heavyweight suet, cold weather fuel, is given freshness and perfume with the fruit of the sunny Mediterranean.

Delicious, but not really the stuff of cricket teas – although I imagine a hot bowl of Sussex pond pudding would go down very well after nets on a chilly winter’s evening.

I’ve decided to capture some of that magic in a cake, studded with nuggets of whole lemon and with a lemon toffee icing, topped with a rubber duck “floating” in the toffee pond.

Let’s hope the opposition don’t take it as a reference to their score.

Sussex pond cake recipe

Makes 12 slices.

For the cake:

• 9oz/250g lemons (three small lemons)

• 9oz/250g butter at room temperature

• 10oz/280g soft brown sugar

• 5 eggs at room temperature

• 10oz/280g self-raising flour

• 2tsp baking powder

For the filling and topping:

• 11floz/300ml double cream

• 5oz/140g butter

• 4oz/110g soft brown sugar

• juice of one lemon

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and base line two 8in/20cm cake tins.
2. To make the cake, put the whole lemons in a pan of boiling water and boil for 20 minutes (this will remove much of the bitterness of the flesh). Drain and leave to cool.
3. Cut the lemons in half and flick out any seeds with the point of the knife. Get rid of any nubs of stalk, too. Put the lemons in the food processor and whizz to a rough mush – aim for no chunks of peel bigger than a pea. Scrape the mixture into a bowl.
4. Put the butter and brown sugar into the food processor (no need to wash it out) and whizz until light and creamy. Beat the eggs lightly with a fat pinch of salt, and add a tablespoonful at a time to the mix, with the motor still running.
5. Put the flour and baking powder in a large bowl and whisk together briefly. Add the butter/sugar/egg mixture and the lemon mush, and fold together.
6. Divide the mixture between the two prepared tins. Bake for about 30 minutes until golden, risen and a skewer poked into the middle comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tins.
7. To make the topping, put the butter, sugar and lemon juice in a pan and boil until thickened to a runny sauce (if you have a thermometer, then look for about 114C). The sauce will probably separate a bit – that’s a classic Sussex pond look, but if it bothers you then a spoonful of the double cream stirred in will emulsify the mix. Leave to cool.
8. When you are ready to assemble the cake, whip the cream lightly*. Spread half on one of the cakes, then dribble half the sauce over, letting it run down the sides a bit.
9. Top with the other cake, and spread with cream, forming a lip around the edge. Fill with a “pond” of the toffee sauce.
10. Decorate with slices of lemon, cut into water lily leaves, and rubber ducks.

* When whipping cream to fill a cake, aim for billowing folds, that seem a little too soft still. It will thicken as you fill the cake. If you take the cream too thickly whipped then it will look grainy and curdled once it is in situ. Since double cream can take five seconds to five minutes to get to the right consistency – sometimes no more than a stir will make it stiffen – start with a manual whisk and resort to electric only if it is stubbornly refusing to thicken after half a minute’s worth of elbow grease.