Sometimes a memory of something you ate as a child will crop up and you'll develop a craving. Then you realise that the ingredients to make said craving are not widely available in the country that you have moved to. I'm not your normal expat, I don't feel the need to make regular trips back to Ireland or the UK to source ingredients or food stuffs and will often make do with what is available here in the Netherlands. 

I do have a motto if you can't get it try making it yourself.

I don't have a sweet tooth but I had cravings for this cake my mother used to make as a child. She always made two versions, one with raisins (aka dead flies, which I don't like) and one without so I could eat it, the cake I'm taking about is Treacle Cake. 
Now I have searched high and low for treacle here in the Netherlands and haven't really seen it in the shops, so it was off to The Hague to dear old Marks and Spencers to see if they stocked it, happily they did.

The next thing was to find the recipe my mother gave me which I knew I had written on a post-it and stuck into a cookbook, the thing is I have rather a lot of them. Thankfully I had the sense to put it into in the front of the most obvious cookbook, my tiny "Real Irish Cookery", so the search didn't take long. It was the trying to remember that I had actually stuck it in there that took the time. This recipe has been in my family for well over 60 years or more and I'm sure its a version that was imparted by the nuns in the school my mother went to so has older roots than that.

Treacle Cake

150g butter (softened)
150g sugar
250g flour
3 eggs
2 dessert spoons of treacle
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
70ml milk

Cream together the butter and sugar
Add the eggs one at a time into the sugar and butter
Add the treacle and mix through
Mix together all the dry ingredients and then add gradually to the creamed mix
Lastly add the milk
Place all ingredients into a lined (use non stick baking parchment) baking tin
Bake in a moderate oven on a low shelf at 150 celsius (fan) 160 (non fan) for 2 hours or until a cocktail stick comes out clean

Enjoy!