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SPANISH CAKES (another way)
Rub six ounces of butter into a pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, and half a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon. Work the mixture into a paste with two well-beaten eggs, roll it out the third of an inch thick, stamp it into fancy shapes, and bake these in a moderate oven. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour.
A plain rubbed-in biscuit dough, closer to a shortbread than a cake in the modern sense. The only real difficulty is that a pound of flour bound with two eggs alone gives a very stiff, crumbly paste.
- Weights in metricSix ounces of butter is 170 g; a pound of flour is 450 g, or roughly 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled. Three tablespoons of sugar is about 40 g.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). At a third of an inch thick the quarter hour given is about right, but pull them when the edges are pale gold — they crisp as they cool and will taste scorched if browned all over.
- The binding is tightTwo eggs is barely enough liquid for 450 g of flour. Expect a dough that looks like rubble before it comes together; press and knead it briefly against the board rather than adding flour. If it truly will not cohere, a tablespoon or two of milk is closer to the intent than a third egg.
- Rub, do not creamThe butter should be cold and worked into the flour to the texture of coarse meal before the eggs go in. Creaming softened butter with the sugar first gives a softer, spreading cookie and loses the short, sandy bite that defines these.
- Rest before rollingHalf an hour wrapped in the refrigerator makes the paste far easier to roll to an even third of an inch and stops the stamped shapes distorting on the sheet.
- CinnamonHalf a teaspoon across a pound of flour is a whisper. Ground cinnamon bought fresh today may well be stronger than whatever had been sitting in a Victorian store cupboard, so taste the raw dough and judge; a full teaspoon is defensible.
- YieldThree dozen or more from a 2-inch cutter, depending on how much you re-roll. They keep well in a tin.
Cassell's carries several "Spanish" cake and biscuit recipes, and the label in nineteenth-century English cookery books usually signals cinnamon, sometimes almonds or wine, rather than any documented Spanish original — the same loose geographic shorthand that produced "Spanish buns" and "Spanish cream." What the recipe really represents is the standard Victorian tea-biscuit formula: fat rubbed into flour, sweetened lightly, bound with egg, rolled and stamped with tin cutters. Cinnamon turns up as the sole flavouring in a great many plain baked goods of the period.