Fire Cooking Recipe: Spiced Fire Cakes

These really do turn into light, spiced and fruity cake in the frying pan. You can always make them as thick drop scones, but they look and rise best if you pour the batter into large metal cookie cutters.

Prepping ahead to make these on a camping trip: before you leave home combine the flour; baking powder; salt; mixed peel and raisins; cinnamon, mixed spice and orange zest into the same bag. Mix the milk and vanilla extract in a bottle and give it a good shake to make sure all the vanilla doesn’t stick to the bottom.

Ingredients
2 eggs
75g caster sugar
200g plain flour
150ml milk
75g butter plus 1 tablespoon to fry in
50g raisins
50g mixed peel
1 teaspoon mixed spice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract/paste
zest of 1 orange

Method

Melt the butter in a frying pan.

In a large bowl, beat together the eggs and sugar. Stir through the flour and fruit mixture then fold in the melted butter and milk.

Melt the last tablespoon of butter in your frying pan.

When the butter is foaming hot, dollop tablespoons of the cake mixture into the frying pan and cook for three minutes or so until golden brown underneath (this time will vary a lot depending on how hot your fire is). If you’re using cookie cutters, don’t fill them more than half-way or they’ll overflow.

Flip them over and cook for another three minutes until browned all over and cooked through. If you’re using cookie cutters just flip the whole thing over, cutter and all, to cook on the other side, then gently press out. If they’re still a little soft on the inside but brown on the outside, just leave them for a couple of minutes when you’ve taken them from the pan and they’ll continue to cook as they cool down.