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Simnel Yeast Cake
This is a plainer cake than some of them, and is preferred by many people. Dissolve half an ounce of dried yeast in a gill of lukewarm water, add a spoonful of castor sugar, and work it into half a pound of flour to make a dough. Lay it aside for an hour to rise, then mix with it ten ounces of currants, four ounces of candied peel, two beaten eggs, four ounces of fresh butter beaten to a cream, and a tea-spoonful of mixed spice. These materials are to be well worked in, and the dough left to rise for another hour in a warm place, covered. Then put half of it in a tin lined with a few folds of buttered paper, and on it put a layer of almond icing half an inch thick (see ALMOND ICING, FOR CAKES); the remainder of the cake mixture goes on top of this. Bake for about two hours in a steady oven. When cold the outside of the cake can be coated all over, or on top only, with more almond icing, half an inch thick. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A small, very heavily fruited yeast cake with a hidden seam of marzipan. The proportions are British and Victorian, and two of them — the yeast quantity and the baking time — need adjusting before you start.
- Yeast, the one thing to changeHalf an ounce (14 g) of dried yeast to half a pound of flour is a very large amount by modern standards; Victorian dried yeast was likely less potent and less reliably alive than modern granules. Use about 1½ teaspoons of instant or 7 g of active dried yeast; more will give a beery, coarse crumb.
- A gillIn a British book of this date a gill is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. With 8 oz of flour that gives a soft, slack dough, which is what the recipe asks for at this stage — it says dough, not batter.
- Ingredient namesCastor sugar is superfine sugar. Almond icing is marzipan — allow roughly 1 to 1½ lb for the buried layer and the top at the half-inch thickness specified, more if you coat the cake all over. Mixed spice is the British blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, coriander and clove; a teaspoon of pumpkin-pie spice is close enough.
- OvenA "steady oven" here means a moderate, unchanging heat — roughly 325F/160C. Steadiness matters more than the exact number, since the cake is dense with fruit and sugar.
- Baking timeThe mixture is heavy with fruit and fills a 7 inch round tin. Start testing with a skewer at about 1½ hours, though the full two hours may well be needed. Tent the top with foil once it has coloured.
- Lining the tinThe "few folds of buttered paper" are insulation, not just release. Use a double layer of parchment on base and sides, and tie a band of brown paper round the outside if your oven runs hot at the edges.
- The buried marzipanRoll the middle layer to fit the tin exactly and set it on the first half of the dough without pressing down. The second half of the dough should be dropped on in spoonfuls and levelled gently, so the marzipan is not dragged out of place while the cake rises.
- YieldOne small cake, 8 to 10 slices. It keeps for a week or more in a tin, and slices better on the second day. Probable cost of 2s 6d places it as an occasional cake rather than an everyday one.
Simnel is one of the oldest cake names in English, generally traced to the Latin simila, the finest white wheat flour, and it appears in medieval records long before the almond-topped Easter cake familiar today. It belonged to the middle of Lent — Mothering Sunday, when servants and apprentices were given leave to visit their home parish and often carried a cake with them — and rival versions were associated with Shrewsbury, Bury and Devizes, some of them boiled before baking and finished with a hard crust. The eleven marzipan balls now treated as obligatory are a later convention; what Cassell's records here is the older structure, a rich yeast dough with a concealed stratum of almond paste, and the note that it is "plainer than some of them" reflects a period when the same name covered several quite different cakes and a cook needed to be told which one she was getting.