The best smell of Christmas for me is the smell of black cake. From its deep fruity rummy days of preparation, to its mouth-watering baking scent, black cake puts me in the mood for the holidays like nothing else!
My mother bakes it for Christmas, but before her my grandmother was the one who'd grind, soak, mix, and then bake the entire Christmas eve, filling us with scents that would forever mean Christmas to all of us who were in range.
Recently my mother has been trying to get us to write down her recipe for black cake. She's been insisting that we own it--her version of it--before she leaves us. I don't want to think of her ever leaving us, but yesterday at a family brunch I finally took some notes from her on how to make black cake. And--as every conversation in a Guyanese gathering goes--lo and behold the note-gathering on black cake turned to politics. Turns out, even black cake has a political history in Guyana: there was a pre-Burnham-ban-on-foreign-goods-black cake, and a post-Burnham-ban-black cake. (This was, of course, prior to the current PPP regime.)
The pre-Burnham-ban cake had raisins, currents, prunes, other assorted mixed imported fruit, and lilly-white, bleached flour, and the post-Burnham-ban cake had ingredients like preserved bilimbee (sour-ee), five finger, downs, other local fruit, and the much-maligned rice flour. The PNC-ites at the table loudly proclaimed the post-ban cake was JUST as good as the pre-ban cake in consistency and taste, while the ones who still mad at Burnham steups deh teeth and declared rice and downs din have no business in cake.
I actually do remember somebody (nooo not a relative of mine, no way sir!) offering me a lumpy, grainy piece of cake once in Guyana, but I honestly don't recall if the lumpy graininess was a result of the post-ban ingredients or just the work of a lousy baker. Can't remember.
I'm baking this Christmas, but I'm leaving that black cake business to the experts. I'm looking for a nice simple recipe that a beginner like me can handle. But you can find a basic recipe for black cake in Carnegie School of Home Economics' What's Cooking in Guyana, a book no self-respecting Guyanese household should be without. I have the 1994 edition (top left). The latest edition (2004) is imaged above (right).
And don't worry about the few extra pounds. Bake and eat to your heart's content. All the gyms will be offering low low membership fees come next year. Eat cake!
