I can’t remember where I heard of this book but I’ve had my eye on it for some time because it’s all about food from my childhood! I was basically that kid who read under the table and apart from Singaporean stories like Bookworm Club and Mr Midnight, I also read a lot of books by authors such as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, as well as books like the Chalet School, Pollyanna, and The Little Princess. I loved my school but I really wanted to stay in a boarding school and have tuck boxes.

Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer was, as far as I could tell, a book that celebrated these foods that I grew up wanting to try, but I didn’t know if that was true until I stumbled across a copy of the book in our London AirBnB last year. It was love as first sight as I flipped through the pages and I bought a second-hand copy soon after.

The book is fantastic! It is truly a love story to the books of my childhood – some recipes aren’t proper recipes per se (e.g. scrambled eggs or odd suppers) but exist because they were key scenes of old childhood classics. Since I have time, I decided to try three recipes from this book:

Miss Dimity’s Jam Scones

I love Dimmy but these scones were like the Plain Scones from The Book of Scones, which I wasn’t too enthusiastic about. They’re more to the biscuit side than the cake side and didn’t rise that much. I made these because I wanted to finish up some clotted cream, but for future scones, I’ll stick to The Book of Scones.

Holiday Lemonade

I enjoyed this but it’s very tart! I would actually put in more sugar than what the book recommends, even though I normally cut the amount of sugar. Still, my family liked this and I found it very refreshing.

Bruce Bogtrotter’s Heroic Chocolate Cake

I have read Matilda countless times and although I don’t dare to eat an entire chocolate cake myself (and I don’t have a Miss Trunchbull forcing me to do so), I am perfectly willing and happy to make my family eat chocolate cake. It’s my first time doing a double layer cake and I made so many mistakes!

First thing was that I didn’t realise that the cake needed to be cooled before being iced, so I made the icing way too early. And I don’t think I grease the tin enough because it was so hard to get the cake out! (I didn’t have round cake tins either)

But eventually, I managed to cool it, cut it in half, and ice it! I was pretty happy that you could see it was a two-layer cake AND my family seemed to like it. It was really sweet but luckily the chocolate taste is very strong so what you get is a very rich chocolate cake… the kind of thing that only a certain boy could finish in one sitting.

Overall

I love this book! Out of the three recipes I tried, the only one I wasn’t wild about was the scones recipe. But I have plenty of alternatives for that and to be honest, I love the write-ups and references to books more than the recipes. Definitely a must-buy if you grew up salivating over the food in The Five Find Outers, The Little Princess (Sara’s Warming Buns!), Anne of Green Gables (there’s a recipe for liniment cake too!) and many other childhood stories.