This is a Donna Hay recipe, from a few of her books, most notably Modern Baking which is an, I think, under-celebrated baking bible. I’ve made this cake for many years and it’s a firm favourite in our house and needs few ingredients – we keep a stash of chai tea on hand especially for it and the rest are store-cupboard/fridge staples. It’s also a good way of using up too much milk.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon of loose chai tea (if you can only find tea bags just open them up, one tablespoon is about two tea bags’ worth)
Two tablespoons of boiling water
375g of self raising flour
330g of caster sugar
two teaspoons of mixed spice
4 eggs
375ml of milk
250g of butter, melted
two teaspoons of vanilla extract.

What you do

Preheat oven to 180C. I use a 9′ savarin/bundt tin for this – specifically this one. Butter the tin and dust with flour and shake off the excess.

Put the loose tea in the boiling water and let it steep for 5/10 minutes, whilst you melt the butter and let it cool.

Note: you’ll need all the tea mixture for the cake, ie the tea leaves and the water.

Now you can go ahead and put all the ingredients, including the tea mixture, into a freestanding mixer and whisk it until combined, or if you want to do it the old fashioned way then you can do butter and sugar – cream together, then add the vanilla extract, eggs, flour, mixed spice, tea mixture and milk.

Pour the batter into the cake mould and bake for about 35 minutes. Mine usually takes 40 but you can check after 30. Do check it’s done with a skewer inserted – it should come out clean. Leave it in the tin for about ten minutes, I loosen mine around the edge and the middle ring bit with a knife and then turn out.

It’s a really lovely, moist cake that keeps for a good few days and is so much nicer than you think it might be.