Three Quick and Easy Bakes: Marmalade Chocolate Loaf, Fifteens, and Brown Bread Shortcake
Katie Smith shares recipes for a chocolate loaf cake with a seasonal twist, a no-bake Irish classic, and a traybake that uses up leftover bread. Words by Katie Smith. Photos by Georgia Rudd.
Welcome to Vittles Cooking! This week Irish baker Katie Smith shares three easy everyday bakes to add sweetness to your week: a loaf cake, a fridge cookie, and a traybake.
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Marmalade Chocolate Loaf Cake, Fifteens, and Brown Bread Shortcake
Katie Smith shares recipes for a chocolate loaf cake with a seasonal twist, a no-bake Irish classic, and a traybake that uses up leftover bread. Words by Katie Smith. Photos by Georgia Rudd.



During the first COVID lockdown, I started a home bakery from my parents’ kitchen in Derry. On Saturday mornings, I’d wake up at 4:45 am and make the commute downstairs to bake croissants in our temperamental oven. With my twin sister as my cake chauffeur, we drove across the city delivering boxes of cookies and pastries to housebound families in need of sweets. I’d bake chocolate chip cookies in batches of eight using one domestic oven tray, as multiple apple turnovers cooled on my makeshift cooling rack (ie, the kitchen table), and eat breakfast quickly while surrounded by boxes of layer cakes.
Before the pandemic, I had been used to working in the spacious kitchens of London bakeries and restaurants, with the luxury of professional equipment and, most importantly, kitchen porters – the true backbone of any kitchen. Then, suddenly, I was back at home in Ireland with one bowl, a single spatula, and just a few cake tins stacked precariously in a cupboard that also housed every school book I had ever owned.
My attempt at running a bakery at home taught me above all to keep things simple, and now that I’m back to working in professional kitchens, I still prioritise the easiest cakes possible whenever I bake at home. After rolling hundreds of croissants and cookies all day long, I prefer to cream butter and sugar by hand with a wooden spoon in my small home kitchen, and use a wine bottle or whatever’s to hand to roll out pastry – I’m a lazy pastry chef when I’m out of office.
The three recipes I’m sharing here are expressly intended for home kitchens and lazy cooks alike: a double marmalade chocolate loaf cake you can whip up in around an hour; fifteens that can be made with no need for an oven; and a shortcake that incorporates a staple ingredient in most homes – bread. All three are delicious and can be rustled up quickly for dessert or tea with friends with minimal effort.
Double Marmalade Chocolate Loaf Cake
I’ve been collecting recipes ever since I began cooking and have a different flour-encrusted notebook filled with scrawled notes for each place I’ve worked. One notebook I recently rediscovered contains recipe tests from a summer when, in between jobs, developing a good chocolate cake became my full-time occupation. I have continued to test and tweak this recipe over the years, and now I share it from my notebook to yours. Although this chocolate cake tastes great on the day you bake it, it gets better with time, as it sits on your kitchen counter, slowly disappearing throughout the week.
Makes 1 loaf cake
Time 1 hr 5 mins