Review

A book that carries the subtitle “traditional, tempting, tried-and-true” promises to deliver a lot, but also has a lot to live up to. The Country Women’s Association Cakes book contains more than 80 recipes for a range of cakes, many familiar to Australians from the kitchens of older relatives. Flavours are often fresh and light, in the form of recipes such as a light Gingerbread, Pineapple Carrot Cake, plain Tea Cake, or a simple Cherry Cake. The vast majority of recipes are presented as a two-page spread with an attractive photograph. At the end of the book are some recipes for icings and custard.

The personal touch in this book is the attribution of each recipe to a particular member of the national Country Women’s Association affiliated branches (almost all from the states of Victoria and Tasmania, with just a few from Queenland and the Northern Territory). It’s a pity that there is no explanation for the choice of recipes, why there are no contributions from branches in New South Wales, or what the rationale for this particular collection is. A small number of recipes have a short comment or history from the contributing member, but most have no context.

At first glance you might be forgiven for thinking this is the CWA Fruit Cake book. With at least thirteen fruitcakes (gourmet fruit cake, light fruit cake, sweet potato fruit cake, boiled plum pudding, …), and many many more containing some dried fruit (date and nut loaf, sultana loaf, …), this is not exactly a balanced collection. It is, however, a refreshing collection of cakes where the focus is squarely on the cake and not on lashings of decoration, frosting, layers, or the other usual suspects of contemporary cake books.

The recipes are mostly fairly short, with ingredients listed in an inconsistent mix of volume and weight measures from recipe to recipe (more than just the standard Australian practice of using volume measures for most ingredients). In testing, two of the four recipes we tried (in different ovens) had either incorrect pan sizes or misleading cooking times. This need not present a major problem for experienced home bakers, but it does make this book unreliable for new cooks.

I liked the book, but the lack of balance and organisation of recipes (there seems to be no rhyme or reason to their order), the recipe flaws, and little context left me wishing for something better. Traditional and tempting? For the most part, yes. Tried-and-true? Mixed. Nonetheless, it is perhaps the only recent work to present old-fashioned cakes in Australia with attractive photographs.