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Queen Cakes
Beat half a pound of butter to a cream. Add gradually half a pound of loaf sugar, one pound of dried flour, half a pound of picked currants, and a flavouring of either grated lemon-rind, grated nutmeg, or almonds. Beat the yolks and whites of three eggs, first separately, and afterwards together. Mix with them a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda, which has been dissolved in a table-spoonful of hot milk, and a small tea-spoonful of thick cream. Stir this mixture into the cake, and beat thoroughly for several minutes. Butter some small queen-cake tins or patty-pans, half fill them with the batter, and bake in a brisk oven for about twenty minutes. Queen-cake tins are generally made heart-shaped. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. for this quantity.
A Victorian small cake, close to a currant-studded pound cake baked in individual tins. The proportions are heavy on flour, so the mixing method matters more than the timing.
- The weights in modern termsHalf a pound is 8 oz (225 g) each of butter, sugar and currants, against a full pound (450 g) of flour. That is roughly 3 1/2 cups of flour to two sticks of butter, which gives a stiff batter rather than a pourable one.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone, to be broken and crushed before use. Ordinary caster or superfine sugar is the right substitute; granulated works but creams less readily into the butter.
- Dried flourFlour was warmed in front of the fire or in a cooling oven to drive off damp, since it was stored in sacks in cold larders. Modern bagged flour needs nothing done to it; just weigh and sift.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 400-425F (200-220C). Small cakes half-filling patty tins may be done before twenty minutes at that heat, so start testing at twelve. At a lower 375F for a more even crumb, allow the full twenty.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon of carbonate of soda is baking soda, and there is little acid in the mixture for it to react with. The lift comes mainly from the creamed butter and the beaten eggs, so do not shorten the creaming or stint on beating the eggs.
- Beating the eggsYolks and whites separately, then together, is the hinge of the method. It aerates a batter that is otherwise too dry and dense to rise, and the aeration is lost if the mixture then sits about before baking.
- Picked currantsDried currants once arrived full of stalks and grit and had to be sorted and rubbed in flour. Bought currants today need only a rinse and a thorough drying, or they will bleed into the crumb.
- Tins and yieldPatty-pans are shallow individual tins, smaller and shallower than a modern muffin cup; the recipe notes queen-cake tins were generally heart-shaped. This quantity should fill somewhere in the region of two to three dozen tins half full, depending on tin size.
Queen cakes appear in English cookery books from the early eighteenth century onward, and by the Victorian period they were a fixture of the tea table: a rich pound-cake batter with currants, baked small so that each guest received a whole cake rather than a slice. This recipe notes that the tins were generally heart-shaped. The origin of the name is not settled -- it has been linked to various queens and to the cakes' dainty character, but none of these accounts can be documented. The probable cost quoted here -- 2s. 4d. -- reflects a book written for households keeping accounts.