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Love Cakes
Take four eggs, a tea-cupful of yeast, half a pint of milk, a pound and a half of flour, one pound of butter, half a pound of sifted sugar. Beat the eggs with the yeast and warm milk, make a hollow in the centre of the flour, pour in the mixture; knead this dough, and add the butter by degrees. Let it stand for an hour or more, to rise, then add the sugar, and bake in small buttered cake-tins. The tops of the cakes may be ornamented with citron-peel.
A rich yeast-raised tea cake, closer to brioche than to anything from a modern cake tin. The original assumes barm from a brewery and a cook who judges the oven by hand, so both need translating.
- The yeastA tea-cupful means something in the region of a quarter-pint (about 5 fl oz) of liquid barm or brewer's yeast, a wet living leaven weaker than anything sold today. Roughly 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or about 1/2 oz fresh yeast, should give comparable lift; use the full half-pint of milk as directed.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, not 8. A pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups; a pound of butter is 4 sticks; half a pound of sifted sugar is a generous cup.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A dough this rich and sweet browns fast, so a moderate oven of about 350F suits it; small tins will likely need 20 to 25 minutes, and should be watched.
- The hingeAdd the butter slowly, in small pieces, to a dough that has already been kneaded to some elasticity. Dumped in at once it simply greases the flour and the cakes come out heavy.
- Sugar last, and for a reasonThe sugar goes in after the rise, not before. Yeast works poorly in a heavily sugared dough, so the leavening is done first and the sweetening folded in afterwards. Expect the dough to slacken and go sticky at that point; chilling it for 20 minutes makes it manageable.
- Second riseThe recipe stops at one rise, but once the sugar is worked in the cakes benefit from 30 to 45 minutes proving in their tins before baking, until visibly puffed.
- Citron peelCandied citron, the thick-cut peel of Citrus medica, is still sold at Christmas and in Italian groceries. Mixed candied peel is the usual substitute; press it on just before baking so it does not scorch.
- YieldSomething over 4 lb of dough, enough for roughly two dozen small cakes in a muffin tin or fluted moulds. Best eaten the day they are made, or warmed through the next morning.
Cassell's belongs to the last generation of English cookery books in which small tea cakes were still commonly raised with yeast rather than with baking powder, which by the 1870s was fast replacing it in domestic baking. The method here — a rich dough of eggs, butter and barm, sweetened only after fermentation, and baked in small buttered tins — is the same family that produces brioche in France and the older English "cakes" of the eighteenth century, before the word narrowed to mean a chemically leavened sponge. The name is not explained in the book and no single origin is documented. Citron peel, the ornament called for at the end, was an expensive imported sweetmeat, which places these firmly among cakes made for company rather than for every day.