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Twelfth Cake, Lady Caroline Lamb's
Take a quarter of a peck of pure flour carefully dried, three pounds of currants, a quarter of a pound of raisins, half a pound of refined sugar, quarter of a pound of sweet and half an ounce of bitter almonds, blanched and sliced, two ounces of orange and two ounces of candied lemon-peel, and spices according to taste. Mix all thoroughly; then take one pint of cream, and put to it three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter washed first in pure and afterwards in rose-water; place these in a gentle heat. Beat up the whites and yolks, separately, of six eggs, and the yolks only of six more. Add to them a little rose-water, two table-spoonfuls of cardamom brandy, half a glassful of old Rhenish, hock, or champagne, a quarter of a pint of fresh yeast, and a little fine salt. Mix the liquids together, strain them, add the dry materials warm, and mix the whole into a light smooth batter. Place it before a fire for twenty minutes to rise, butter your hoop, and use what flour is necessary to make the cake sufficiently stiff. Set it in the oven with some sheets of brown paper well floured to prevent its burning. In about a couple of hours it will be done. Ice it in the usual manner, and stick any ornaments you choose upon the icing before it is quite dry.
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A yeast-raised Twelfth Night cake on a grand scale, and one that cannot be reproduced as printed: the ingredient list includes half an ounce of bitter almonds. The notes below explain the problem and clear up the older measures.
- The bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed, chewed or wetted. Half an ounce, blanched and sliced into a cake that is never heated beyond the temperature of its own crumb, is not a flavouring quantity in modern terms. Sale of the raw nuts to consumers is restricted in the UK, US and EU for exactly this reason.
- Baking does not make it safeTwo hours in a moist, dense batter will drive off some of the cyanide, but the loss is unpredictable and depends on how the nuts were cut, how wet the batter was and how quickly the crumb set. There is no way to know from the page how much remains. Use a current Twelfth cake or rich fruit cake recipe instead.
- "A quarter of a peck of pure flour"A peck of flour was conventionally reckoned at about 14 lb, so this is roughly 3 to 3.5 lb — and the recipe then tells you to add more flour at the end to stiffen it. This is a cake for a household party of twenty or more, not a family tea.
- "Cardamom brandy" and "old Rhenish"Cardamom brandy appears to be a home infusion of bruised cardamom in spirit. Rhenish and hock both mean German Rhine wine; the recipe treats it as interchangeable with champagne, so the point seems to be acidity and aroma rather than a specific bottle.
- Yeast, not baking powderA quarter of a pint of fresh yeast raises the whole thing, and the twenty minutes before the fire is a warm proof, not a rest. Chemical raising agents had not displaced yeast in rich cakes of this kind, which is why the method reads more like bread than like a Victoria sponge.
- Rose-water twice overWashing butter "in pure and afterwards in rose-water" was a way of working out buttermilk that would sour the cake during a long bake, while leaving a trace of perfume behind.
- Hoop and brown paperThe hoop is a bottomless band set on a papered baking sheet; the floured brown paper is there, as the recipe says, to keep the cake from burning. Modern equivalents are a deep tin lined with parchment and a collar of paper or foil.
Twelfth cake belonged to the night of 5–6 January, the close of Christmas and the eve of Epiphany, when a large spiced fruit cake was cut and the household drew characters — King, Queen, and a cast of fools — with a bean or pea baked inside deciding who presided over the evening's misrule. Attaching such a recipe to Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828), the novelist and Byron's most public entanglement, looks more like a Victorian editorial habit than a documented kitchen record: aristocratic names plausibly lent authority to a formula, and such attributions were often carried over from earlier compilations without a source. The recipe itself is genuinely of its period, though — yeast-risen, cream-enriched, perfumed with rose-water and cardamom, and stiffened with flour by feel at the last minute. By the time this dictionary appeared, Twelfth Night as a public festival had faded in England and the cake's role had largely migrated to Christmas, which is why the rich iced fruit cake survives while the bean and the King of the Bean do not.