Eccles cake Eccles cakes do not have Protected Geographical Status, so may be manufactured anywhere and still labelled as "Eccles" cakes. The Banbury cake is an oval cake from Banbury, Oxfordshire, similarly filled with currants. The Chorley cake (from Chorley in Lancashire) is flatter, made with shortcrust pastry rather than flaky pastry and is devoid of sugar topping. The Blackburn cake is named after the town of Blackburn, Lancashire, and is made with stewed apples in place of currants. British fire brigades have reported fires started by Eccles cakes overcooked in microwave ovens. The problem occurs because sugar, contained in the cakes,
William Eccles William Eccles William Henry Eccles FRS (23 August 1875 – 29 April 1966) was a British physicist and a pioneer in the development of radio communication. He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, England. Following graduation from the Royal College of Science, London, in 1898, he became an assistant to Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian radio entrepreneur. In 1901 he received his doctorate from the Royal College of Science. Eccles was an advocate of Oliver Heaviside's theory that a conducting layer of the upper atmosphere could reflect radio waves around the curvature of the Earth, thus enabling their transmission over long distances.