Eccles Cake

A tasty but sickly-sweet baked-good, consisting of a puff pastry dome filled with a currant (and sometimes raisin), brown sugar and butter filling, often topped with crystallized white sugar. It was named for Eccles, a small town in Lancashire, England.

There is a local variant on the Eccles cake, known as the Chorley Cake. Legend has it that a Chorley baker was eager to steal the Eccles recipe and discovered that the only way to smuggle a cake out of Eccles was in his shoe. The sugar fell off the outside and the cake became flatter and denser.