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Sugar Cakes
Rub half a pound of fresh butter to cream; then add half a pound of powdered sugar, three well-whisked eggs, one pound of flour, and as much milk as will form a dough. The milk and flour should be added alternately. Roll the pastry out, cut it into small round cakes, and bake these on a floured tin in a moderate oven.
A plain creamed-butter biscuit of the sort every Victorian household kept in a tin. The proportions are sound; only the vagueness about liquid and oven needs translating.
- The hinge: add milk sparinglyThe dough should be stiff enough to roll, not soft like a drop batter. Start with about 2 tablespoons of milk and add more only if the flour will not come together; a wet dough spreads into shapeless discs on the tin.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. Small cakes about a quarter-inch thick will take 10-14 minutes, until the edges are pale gold and the tops set.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of butter is 2 sticks (225g), half a pound of caster sugar is a little over 1 cup, and a pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups. Weighing is more reliable here than measuring, since the flour-to-fat ratio is what keeps them short rather than tough.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period the term means sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Caster sugar creams better with the butter and gives a crisper cake.
- "Rub to cream"Work the butter alone until it is soft and pale before the sugar goes in, then beat the two together. Cold butter straight from the fridge will not take the sugar and the cakes will be dense.
- Handle like pastry, not cookie doughRoll once, cut, and gather the scraps only once more. Repeated rerolling develops the gluten and the cakes turn hard rather than short.
- The floured tinA flour-dusted baking sheet works, but parchment is easier and prevents the undersides scorching, which is the usual failure with a hot bottom tin.
- YieldA large batch: cut at 2 inches across and a quarter-inch thick, the dough will give upwards of fifty cakes. The book gives no number.
The recipe is plain: butter, sugar, eggs, flour and enough milk to bind, with no flavouring at all beyond what the butter gives. Cakes of this kind were cut out with a plain round cutter and kept in a tin for tea or for children. There is no raising agent; chemical leavens were available in the later nineteenth century, but household biscuit recipes of this type continued to rely on well-beaten eggs and a short dough. The name is simply descriptive, and "sugar cake" turns up in British and American cookery books for a range of only loosely related plain sweet biscuits and small cakes.