Spore prints from King Alfred’s cakes
King Alfred’s cake is one of the common names for the fungus, Daldinia concentrica, which looks like hard, roundish lumps of coal found stuck to the surface of decaying wood. They’re quite common to see in deciduous woodland especially on fallen beech and ash branches.
King Alfred’s Cakes make great firelighters and can be used like charcoal briquettes for campfire cooking as they burn slowly. It’s even been suggested that they can used to transport fire as they smoulder for a very long time.
Why are they called King Alfred’s cakes?
The fungus gets its name from a famous traditional tale, referencing their burnt appearance. The story goes that King Alfred, taking refuge from the Vikings in a peasant woman’s home, was asked to watch over her cakes, baking by the fire. Distracted, he let them burn. Embarrassed by his mistake, he scattered the cakes to hide the evidence! As the fungus looks like small burnt cakes, the name King Alfred’s cakes went into common use.
I found a King Alfred’s cake last week and took it home so I could use it on my next camping trip as a firelighter. I placed it on my worktop in the morning and in the evening, I noticed a black ring around the fungus - it had released spores! I wasn’t sure whether it had released all its spores so I put it on a piece of white paper and left it overnight to see if I could capture the spore print on paper. As you can see in the photos below, it did.
The spores are so fine and really black! I love the contrast between the sharp inner edge of the inner circle to the soft outer edge.
I made a couple of prints by moving the King Alfred’s cake on the paper so the spore prints overlapped. When moving it, I needed to be quite careful not to smudge the existing print.
If you want to make spore prints and keep them, you can use hairspray or another fixative spray. You’ll need to spray lightly, from a distance away so you don’t disturb the spores, and apply several coats. Even then, I found that the spore print faded quite a lot as you can see from the photos below. However, I’ve loved displaying them as temporary pieces of art!
Author: Denise Hope, home educating mum of two boys