Raising Agent For Fruit Tea Loaf

Our answer

Nigella's Fruit Tea Loaf (from FEAST) is a dense tea loaf cake made with dried fruits that have been plumped up via an overnight soaking in black tea. It is best eaten cold, spread with good butter, and accompanied by a cup of tea. Nigella's recipe uses plain (all-purpose) flour with added baking powder and bicarbonate of soda (baking soda). The bicarbonate of soda gives the mixture and extra lift and it is difficult to substitute it directly for baking powder.

We note that many traditional fruit loaf recipes use self-raising flour so we would suggest maybe using this instead of the combination of plain flour plus baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. If you only have plain flour and baking powder then you would need to sift the 250g plain flour with 3¼ teaspoons of baking powder to make the equivalent of self-raising flour. The pinch of ground cloves gives a slight background flavour but can be omitted, or you could use ½ teaspoon of ground mixed spice (pumpkin pie spice) instead. However, we would mention that as we have not tried the Tea Loaf with any of these alternatives, we are unable to guarantee the results.