My grandmother, Nellie Allison, was the best baker. She showed me how to make stotties cakes many years ago, so I’ve built this site to share with the world.
Get Nellie’s stottie cake recipe
Background
When I was little, the whole family gathered at her house every Sunday afternoon for tea. She spent the whole day baking in preparation; stottie cakes, meat pies, fruit pies and scones, amongst other things. There was nothing quite like her still-warm home baking.
I’d sometimes help out a little when she was busy in the kitchen, and with brother and cousin had the job of distributing stotties fresh out of the oven to her nearby friends and neighbours. I think they will have looked forward to those stotties as much as we did.
Years later I left home, living far enough away to make visiting infrequent. It was only then that I realised just how much I took all her work for granted (I didn’t mention she also cooked Sunday dinner for her grandkids) and how much I missed her home baking.
So I asked my mam to get the stottie recipe from grandma for me. I still have the handwritten note, dictated by Nellie just as she said it 25 or so years ago. It’s grubby now from years of greasy baking fingers picking it up to double check I was doing things right.
Nellie’s recipe was just what she had in her head, handed on from her mother, growing up in the pit villages around Chester-le-Street, when I suppose folk baked most days. She always swore her stotties weren’t as good as they used to be when she baked them on a coal-fired range, and rued the day she let the council replace it with an electric oven. My granda was adamant they weren’t a patch on what his mother used to make in Roddymoor and stubbornly refused to refer to them as stotties, only as breadbuns.
But they’re all I’ve known. And they are fabulous (even if mine never come out quite as good as I remember hers). One thing’s for sure – they don’t taste like the bread that commercial bakers try to pass off as stottie cake. The things you get in the likes of Greggs would never stott.
One day a post on Facebook’s Crook Past and Present Group included a photo of Nellie, and I was amazed how people commented how they remembered her and her stottie cakes.
So I’m sharing her recipe, pretty much word-for-word from the hand-written note. I’ve also added photos of each stage of the process, plus a few extra notes about what I’ve learned from baking Nellie’s stotties over the years.
Read Nellie’s stottie cake recipe
Nellie Allison's stottie cake recipe 