Time to Make | Candied Citrus Pound Cake

It should go without saying that someone who cooks professionally is committed to food. But as I watch Stroma Sinclair making a cake batter with her sleeves rolled up, I realise her commitment reaches another level. The pastry chef quite literally wears her love of ingredients, from the myriad tattoos that include fruits (gooseberries, figs, citron) and ‘CUSTARD’ written on her right hand, to the crocodile clip emblazoned with ‘BUTTER’ in her hair and, on the sofa, a half-knitted cardigan with a chard leaf design, for the baby she’s expecting next summer. Naturally, she’s referring to it (the knit, not the baby) as ‘the chardigan’.

Stroma’s most loved ingredient, however, is something altogether less colourful than the fresh produce she has chosen to put upon her person. Flour is her thing, specifically flours made with unprocessed or ancient grains farmed regeneratively – rye, spelt, wholemeal wheat – and she always takes care to know the provenance of those she works with: the farm, the farmer, the clone of grain. “It makes so much sense to apply a farm-to-table approach to flour, as you would to any seas about which she takes care to know the provenance: the farm, the farmer, the clone of grainnal produce,” she says. She admits that, prior to her discovery of ancient grains, she had no idea where the bags of nondescript white flour she used came from; “I’d have a hard time going back to them, though. White pastry doesn’t taste of anything – all my bakes have a brownish tinge these days.” Even her name has a (tenuous) connection to flour: Stroma is an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland, a stone’s throw from John O’Groats – a groat, of course, being the hulled kernel of a grain.

Today Stroma is using a sifted flour from Landrace flour mill in Somerset for a pound cake, a quicker (and perennial) alternative to Christmas cake, so-called for its traditional ratio of ingredients: a pound each of butter, flour, sugar, eggs. This iteration – laced with candied citrus peel – is one she made recently for the Friday gardening volunteers in Arnold Circus, the east London address of Stroma’s professional home, Leila’s – a shop, cafe and temple to some of the very best seasonal produce the capital has to offer.

“I love that you can taste all the ingredients in it, including the nuttiness of the brown flour,” she says. The candied peel comes through easily too, she tells me, and it is one of her favourite low-waste creations, taking leftover citrus peel, boiling it until soft and yielding, then lashing it with sugar for a longer life. “There is so much you can do with it,” she says, of the jars of candied orange, lemon, kumquat and grapefruit in syrup before her, “and it contains so much sugar that it keeps for ages – I’m still using some from a year ago.”

Stroma describes herself as “obsessed” with candied peel, “a natural decoration,” she says. At Leila’s, her nut, dried fruit and peel-adorned Christmas cakes have become a hotly anticipated festive favourite, each of them unique. Some, prettily patterned, others garlanded with a crown of citrus and figs and sultaninas, more still are strewn with thick slices of candied orange and walnuts and then – my favourites of all – the faces with puckered lips of dehydrated apple and glacé cherries for rosy cheeks. I ask when she started making the cakes. “Prep began in October,” she tells me, “and I’m now in the final stages of feeding them loads of brandy before the marzipan, icing and decorating begins.” Christmas cake-making is a notoriously laborious process – Stroma can make just 40 in total each year – so today’s pound cake makes a natty alternative, iced with a simple lemon glaze before she finishes it with its own original design in peel.

It wasn’t always Stroma’s plan to become a pastry chef – baking was mostly her hobby for a while. A degree in contemporary craft at Falmouth fed her creative sensibility but left her without a clear sense of which medium she might like to work in. “I liked to do a bit of everything,” she says – glass, ceramics, wood – and remarks that the same is true of her various predilections in baking, “I don’t just want to do cake! I want to make pastry, biscuits, jellies and bread.” (A pastry polymath, if you will). She wrote her dissertation about how cake was a craft, arguing that to mix a batter or put colloidal gel into a mould has similar demands to any other kind of craft – casting for sculpture, for example. “Parts of baking are quite scientific and precise,” says Stroma, “but it’s also obviously something that involves a lot of creative spin. This is absolutely the case in other mediums, too.”

When she moved to London – and initially worked in a Chelsea garden centre – Stroma had a friend who worked at Italo, an independent café in Vauxhall. They began to take two of Stroma’s ginger cakes each week, and her cake-making grew from there. “For a long time, I didn’t see baking as a job,” she says, but eventually she decided to embrace this thing that she found consumed her spare time, and got a stage (or kitchen internship) at Dalston bakery, Violet, before moving on to eventually become head of pastry at the late chef Skye Gyngell's Spring restaurant in Somerset House.

Stroma admits that, after six years at Spring, she felt there was nowhere else to go in restaurants; “Spring is an unusual place because everything is made in-house, and dessert is absolutely never an afterthought, as it is in so many restaurants.” When she met Leila McAlister, of Leila’s, it felt like a good fit: somewhere that was utterly uncompromising about produce appealed, as did the creative license that cooking there afforded her. Now, as well as the Christmas cakes, she makes small batches of jam, fruit leather and wholegrain taralli (ring-shaped Italian crackers) for the shop and menu, “Leila says I can make anything I want as long as I use ingredients from the shop,” says Stroma, the exception being the quince from a nearby customer’s tree, from which she’s made quince ketchup, jelly and butter.

The cake is ready to eat now and with a cup of tea, we each eat a slice. It is dense and sweet-bitter, heartening on a cold day when the window’s outlook offers little more than a grey sky and trees bereft of leaves – a bleak midwinter’s afternoon, you could say, but one inordinately brightened by the taste of candied grapefruit bursting forth from a bite of pound cake made by someone who dearly loves the ingredients she works with.

Candied Citrus Pound Cake

Words by Mina Holland.

Photography by Lottie Hampson.