Cook Your Books: German Cake

From a series in The Guardian recreating meals in fiction:

I recently had drinks with friends and relayed the concerns I had about keeping up with my weekly recipes in the first months of this year; I was to have only a gas ring and a toaster to cook with during my time in Liverpool. They recommended Our Endless Numbered Days to me immediately, citing chapters where Peggy and her father cook with far less. I was gripped from the first chapter, and read it cover to cover in less than a day. It’s moving and deeply affecting – a story told in flashback, about a young girl whose father moves them from their home in London to a remote cabin in a European forest. They don’t see another living soul for years. 

As I read, this cake – missed by Peggy and baked by her mother once she is back in London – made me long for an oven. I left the stovetop squirrel stew for another time and, once I had access to an oven again, the first thing I baked was this. It’s home cooking as its best, simple and made with ingredients you may very well have in your cupboard already. A cake for home – for comfort. The kind of cake that’s made by and for family, and one I’d long for after endless years away.