Ingredients

one pound plain flour
half a pound lard (or a quarter pound each of lard and butter)
one large cupful brown sugar
one cupful currants
a little salt
a little nutmeg
two eggs, well beaten
buttermilk

Method

Rub the fat into the flour, and work in all the other dry ingredients.
Make a well in the centre, and pour in the eggs.
Gradually add the buttermilk to the mixture and beat with a wooden spoon.
The consistency should be sufficiently soft and moist for the batter to drop easily from the spoon.
Put the mixture into a greased shallow tin and bake in a moderately hot oven.

Pen-prysg, Glamorgan.

This cake was traditionally baked in a Dutch oven before an open fire in the district of Pen-prysg, Pencoed. The mixture was poured into the shallow tin at the bottom of the oven and then baked slowly on a stand in front of the fire. A similar method could be adopted today by putting the mixture in a shallow tin and baking it under a hot grill.

Teisen lap was regarded as an ‘ordinary’ cake baked fairly regularly in the coal-mining villages of south Wales. It stood the miner in good stead as a ‘sweet’ for his mid-day meal underground and the moist texture of the cake prevented it from crumbling in his tuck-box. The name teisen lap describes the texture of the cake as the adjective llap, now almost extinct, means moist or wet.