Kentish Cobnut Cake - for AlphaBakes

We're on the second run through the alphabet for the AlphaBakes challenge, and this month's choice of the letter K is just as difficult a letter to use the second time round. Few ingredients that I would want to bake with begin with the letter K, and named recipes beginning with K are thin on the ground too.

Last time I made a Kentish Pudding Pie, and I make no apologies for going back to the same county for this Kentish Cobnut Cake, as I had a load of foraged cobnuts to use. Cobnuts are traditionally associated with the English county of Kent; they are a form of hazelnut which takes well to being grown commercially, and are available as fresh nuts for only a few weeks at the beginning of September. They are often paired with apples, another traditional product from Kent, in recipes. It's quite acceptable to use hazelnuts instead of cobnuts, if they aren't available.

I don't know how ginger crept into a traditional English recipe, although spices have been imported for over 500 years, so I guess that's long enough to create a tradition out of it's use. Either way, it added a welcome extra flavour to an otherwise quite bland and dry cake. There are recipes online which look as if they've been adapted to modern tastes, but I wanted to try one that claimed to be traditional. The recipe warned that the cake mixture would be dry and crumbly before baking, so it's no surprise that the cake was quite dry, although I may have overbaked it, as I didn't like the idea of taking it out of the oven while still wet inside.

The cake wasn't unpleasant, but it wasn't anything exceptionally good either. The texture was short and crumbly, but didn't rise much. Perhaps the cake mix was more suited to being made into biscuits - the texture was reminiscent of a soft shortbread.

The AlphaBakes challenge is jointly hosted by Caroline, at Caroline Makes, and Ros, from The More Than Occasional Baker. Ros is the host this month, and has picked the letter K at random. The rules for the challenge can be found here, and Ros will be posting a round up of entries at the end of the month..