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Wasps' Nest Cakes
Beat up six ounces of fresh butter, one egg, and three yolks. Add two spoonfuls of yeast, three spoonfuls of milk, and half a pound of flour. Make the mixture into a paste, roll it out thin, cut it into strips twelve inches long, and three broad. Strew thickly with currants, chopped almonds, sugar, and cinnamon; roll the strips up, put them in a buttered tin, and bake slowly. Strew with sugar, and serve.
A yeasted, butter-rich rolled cake in the central European style, written with the brevity Cassell's reserved for cooks who already knew how enriched doughs behave. The gaps are all in the proving.
- The hinge: it has to riseThe instructions jump from mixing to rolling to baking, but this is a yeast dough and needs time. Let the mixed paste rise until doubled (about 1.5 hours in a warm room, or overnight in the fridge for easier rolling), and give the shaped rolls a second prove of 30-45 minutes in the tin before baking.
- "Two spoonfuls of yeast"A liquid or soft yeast: barm from brewing, or the compressed German yeast also available by this date, not a measure that maps onto modern dried yeast. For half a pound of flour, use about 1 teaspoon of instant dried yeast, or 1.5 teaspoons active dry proofed in the warmed milk.
- Bake slowly'slow' is usually taken to mean somewhere around 300-325F, though no temperature is given here. With this much butter and sugar the outsides colour fast. Reckon on 25-35 minutes depending on how tightly you roll them.
- WeightsSix ounces butter, half a pound (8 oz) flour, one whole egg plus three yolks (four yolks but only one white). That is an extremely rich, soft dough closer to brioche than pastry; chill it before rolling or it will be unmanageable.
- Three spoonfuls of milkSounds impossibly little, and it is only enough because of the butter and eggs. Warm it to blood heat to wake the yeast, and add a little more only if the flour refuses to come together.
- Cutting and rollingStrips twelve inches by three; the recipe does not say which way to roll them, but rolling from the short end gives short fat spirals that stand cut-side up in the tin. Set them close but not touching; they will swell into each other as they prove and bake.
- The fillingNo quantities are given. About 4 oz currants, 2 oz chopped blanched almonds, 2 oz sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon will generously cover the strips this quantity of dough yields; scale up if you roll thinner and get more. Use sweet almonds only.
- YieldDepending on how thin the dough is rolled, half a pound of flour may make anywhere from about five to ten cakes. They are best the day they are baked, as enriched yeast doughs stale quickly.
The name is often said to derive from the German and Austrian Wespennester, spiral yeast cakes whose cut faces, packed with currants and chopped almonds, were thought to resemble the papery cells of a wasps' nest. Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards. The dough itself belongs to the wide family of enriched, barm-raised cakes that stretches from the German Hefezopf to the English lardy cake, all built on the same logic: yeast, butter, dried fruit and spice, in whatever proportion the household could afford. The attribution of the shape to a wasps' nest is traditional rather than documented, though the resemblance is plain enough once the rolls are sliced.