THIS week, we make a return to cakes, and one of the absolute mainstays of British baking - a classic British teabread.

Halfway between a loaf and a cake, the tea-bread is a wonderful invention; a step back into the more genteel days of invitations to take tea, and of afternoons spent in light and entertaining conversation with friends.

Made to be sliced, usually buttered, and enjoyed with a pot of good strong tea, the teabread occupies a particular place in our culinary hearts.

It is from the same world of the Alan Bennett monologue, of the trolleybus, of the Festival of Britain.

It’s the perfect thing for autumnal Sunday afternoons after yomps through the fallen leaves with energetic hounds or children.

Sadly, such specific teatime cakes are seldom seen these days, and certainly not on anything like a large commercial scale. They are still essentially rooted firmly in the domain of the keen home baker.

The classics of the teabread range include the Welsh cake, Bara Brith, a fruit-filled loaf made with tea and brown sugar, heavy on the currants.

The Borrowdale teabread, from a little closer to home, also combines a variety of dried fruit with dark sugar and butter to make a dense, chewy loaf that’s perfect for slicing and buttering.

Banana loaf offers a rich, fudgy texture, perfumed with that heavenly fruit, and there are several versions of the classic fruited loaf, with varying ingredients such as dried or fresh apricots, glacé cherries and dates.

But for me, there is one teabread which stands alone, way out in front, and that’s malt loaf.

A slice of this intensely dark, chewy, sultana-flecked delight and I’m instantly transported back into my childhood.

Grandma almost always had a malt loaf on the go – I think most grandmas in the 1970s seemingly had a packet of Soreen in the house, with its gaudy wrapper of huge purple raisins – and I remember being vaguely obsessed with the unique texture of the slab of malt loaf in my hand.

It was so dense and chewy that one had to be careful when slicing it, lest it flatten into an irreparable puck of stodginess.

Swift sawing action with a sharp, serrated knife was the trick.

A smear of butter was almost always de rigueur, but not absolutely essential. I do find that the thinnest layer of fresh salted butter really works

to accent the dark, malted flavours.

On tasting, it’s always a slight surprise to find that it’s not overly sweet, despite the fudgy texture.

Instead, what you get is a rush of deep, dark maltiness, and the pleasing pop of the juicy raisins. I’d better stop now, before I have to get in the car and go buy a loaf. It’s definitely one of those foods that I can become obsessed by.

I’d never entertained the thought of making my own, until a conversation with a friend on the internet led me to seek out Mary Berry’s recipe, which apparently was the last word in malt loaf.

Well, a few quid on Amazon and a day’s wait later, I had the little book in my hands, and set forth to make the recipe.

It worked incredibly well, and with a couple of tweaks, to satisfy my personal tastes, I’m letting you all in on the secret. It’s a doddle to make, providing you can find the malt extract (most health food shops stock it, as do certain large supermarkets) and the resulting loaf is almost exactly like that of our childhood – rich, dense and chewy; an edible time machine.

Do yourself a favour, and have a go at this little cracker. You won’t regret it.

Aprons on!

Ingredients:

450g plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 tsp baking powder

450g large soft golden sultanas

100g unrefined dark muscovado sugar

350g malt extract

2 tbsps black treacle

4 fresh, free-range eggs, beaten

300ml strong black Earl Grey tea

A pinch of Maldon salt

Extras:

2 x 9” loaf tins

A little butter and flour for lining the tins

Method:

Heat the oven to 150ºC / Gas 2.

Prepare the loaf tins by brushing lightly with melted butter and dusting with flour.

Tap out any excess flour into the bin. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder together into a large bowl.

In a small saucepan, over gentle heat, melt the malt extract, treacle and sugar. Be careful as the malt extract can catch if not watched like a hawk. Remove from the heat, add the sultanas, and then stir in tea and finally the beaten eggs.

Mix this gloopy liquid into the dry ingredients, making sure the mixture is completely blended, and then pour the batter gently into the prepared tins.

Bake the loaves on a tray in the oven for about an hour, or until the loaves are risen and the tops firm to the touch.

Turn off the heat, and allow the tins to sit for 10 minutes, before removing from the ovens and cooling completely.

Turn out and wrap in clingfilm. The instructions say that one should leave the cakes for a couple of days to allow the flavours to develop, but that puts me in mind of Odysseus being strapped to the mast to avoid the lure of the sirens.

Nothing could have stopped me from trying a slice still warm from the oven. Blissful.

However, the flavours are noticeably better as the days pass, so I’ll leave the soul-searching entirely up to you.