Ffern Samhain: soul cakes spiced with perfume and memory

The violet dusk of Samhain night, when the veil wears fine as a spiderweb, whispers of other worlds. Ffern’s first batch captures the scent of just fallen figs using jammy davana and blackcurrant bud. Food writer Jago Rackham has chosen to render this darkness as shortbread: soul cakes, those venerable confections that singing soulers once carried door to door on the eve itself, each bite a memory held in butter and spice.

The recipe respects the old tradition while honouring the fragrance at its heart. Rackham infuses unsalted butter with dried blackcurrant leaves, letting them steep for ten minutes before straining, then creams this fragrant base with caster sugar and egg yolks beaten with grated tonka bean, orange marmalade and a whisper of grenadine. Plain flour, baking powder and salt fold in, followed by milk to form a firm dough that he presses into moulds and scores with a pentagram on top. Two remaining egg yolks, beaten with orange bitters, become the glaze: applied once before baking at 180 degrees Celsius for fifteen minutes, then again halfway through, these cakes emerge golden, introspective, edible ritual.

The Samhain fragrance itself draws on the tradition of soul caking, that liminal practice where the boundary between worlds grows thin and sweetness becomes an offering. Here, tonka bean and blackcurrant leaves ground the recipe in Ffern’s own materials, making these cakes not merely inspired by the scent but woven from its very vocabulary: a conversation between nose and palate, between what you smell and what you taste, each crumb a small bridge between two rituals of remembering.

Imagery courtesy of Ffern (@ffern.co).