An Eccles cake is a small, round pie, similar to a turnover, filled with currants and made from flaky pastry with butter, sometimes topped with brown sugar.

Name and origin

The Eccles cake is named after the English town of Eccles, which is in the historic county of Lancashire and in the ceremonial county of Greater Manchester. Eccles cakes are a Lancashire food tradition, with similar cakes being found in other parts of the County of Lancashire, and are traditionally eaten with Lancashire cheese. It is not known who invented the recipe, but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes commercially; he sold the cakes from his shop, at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary's Road, now Church Street, in the town centre, in 1793. John Ayto states that Elizabeth Raffald was possibly the person who invented the Eccles Cake. The word cake is used in the older general sense of a "portion of bread containing additional ingredients" rather than the narrower meaning of sweet, leavened baked good. Eccles cakes do not have Protected Geographical Status, so may be manufactured anywhere and still labelled as "Eccles" cakes.

Similar pastries

The Chorley cake from Chorley is often seen as the most similar variant of the Eccles cake, however it is flatter, made with shortcrust pastry rather than flaky pastry, and has no sugar topping. The Blackburn cake is named after the town of Blackburn and is made with stewed apples in place of currants. In East Lancashire, a cake known as a "sad cake", can be found in the Darwen, Blackburn, Accrington, Burnley, Colne, Nelson, Padiham areas and throughout the Rossendale area. Similar to the Chorley cake, the sad cake is often up to 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter, and is rolled thinner so that some of the currants show through the pastry. The Banbury cake is an oval cake from Banbury, Oxfordshire, similarly filled with currants, but with added spices. The currants roll in the Commonwealth Caribbean is a descendant of the Eccles cake. It is made into the shape of a roll similar to that of rugelach with currants wrapped and rolled between flaky pastry layers. A variation to the currants roll is the coconut roll (known in Guyana as salara and in Grenada as turnovers ) where the currants are substituted with various colours of shredded coconut. Australian company Arnotts baked a "Spicy Fruit Roll" loosely based on the Eccles cake.