Home › The Principles of Cookery › Wafer Cakes
Wafer Cakes
Wafer cakes are excellent tea-cakes, and they do not take long to make, although a little practice is required to make them successfully. Beat three eggs quite light; wash rather less than a quarter of a pound of butter, so as to extract the salt from it, and mix with it a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar; add to the mixture the beaten eggs, a tea-spoonful of rose-water, and enough sifted flour to make a thin batter. Stir with a wooden spoon till the batter is perfectly smooth and so light that it will break when it falls against the side of the vessel. Heat the wafer-irons; not too hot, however, or the batter will burn. Grease the iron with butter tied in a linen rag, the rag being twice doubled; fill the iron with the batter, and then close it. Place it on the fire so that both sides will heat at once; if this cannot be done, turn the iron frequently. If properly managed the batter will be cooked in about two minutes.
A thin egg batter cooked between hinged irons — closer to a Scandinavian krumkake or an Italian pizzelle than to anything baked in an oven. The batter is the easy part; the iron is where the practice comes in.
- The hinge: iron temperatureWafer batter this sugary scorches fast, and an iron that is too hot will brown the outside before the centre sets. Get the iron hot enough that a drop of batter hisses gently, no more, and expect to sacrifice the first wafer while you calibrate.
- Washing the butterKneading butter under cold water to draw out salt and buttermilk was standard when salting levels were high and inconsistent. Unsalted butter makes the step unnecessary — use a scant 4 oz (about 110 g), softened.
- QuantitiesThree eggs, 4 oz sugar and just under 4 oz butter. The flour is left unspecified, as it often is in recipes of this date; start with about 4 oz (1 cup) and stop when the batter is thin enough to ribbon off the spoon.
- "So light that it will break when it falls"This is the visual test for a fully emulsified, aerated batter — it should drop from the spoon in a sheet that snaps rather than in a sticky thread. Beat the eggs to a pale foam first, then fold them into the creamed butter and sugar.
- Rose-waterStill sold, but modern extracts vary enormously in strength. A teaspoon of a traditional distilled rose-water is right; with a concentrated flavouring, use a quarter of that and taste the raw batter.
- GreasingThe buttered linen rag works, but a folded paper towel or a silicone brush is easier and less likely to smoke. Grease before every wafer or two — these have enough sugar to weld themselves to a dry iron.
- Timing and finishingTwo minutes is accurate for a hot iron. Lift each wafer out limp and shape it at once over a rolling pin or into a cone if you want curls; it stiffens in seconds and will crack after that.
- Equipment and yieldA stovetop krumkake or pizzelle iron is the closest modern equivalent; an electric one takes the guesswork out of the heat. The yield depends entirely on the size of the iron.
Wafers are among the oldest surviving European baked goods, made since the medieval period between long-handled iron plates held over a fire — often engraved with heraldic or religious devices, which is why wafer irons turn up in church inventories as well as kitchen ones. By the nineteenth century the wafer had settled into domestic tea-table use, and hinged irons of this kind were in use in Britain, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Italy, where related batters survive as krumkake, gaufrette and pizzelle. The rose-water belongs to an older flavour vocabulary: before vanilla extract became cheap and universal, rose and orange-flower waters were common perfumes for sweet batters, and English recipe books used them freely well into the Victorian period.