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WINE CAKES (a Danish recipe)
Take three-quarters of a pound of flour, half a pound of fresh butter, half a pound of sugar, and a gill of white wine; mix these ingredients with the yolks of two eggs, knead all well, and roll the paste out. Cut it with a glass into small cakes; brush these over with white of egg, strew them with sugar-almonds or pounded cinnamon, and bake of a light colour.
A rich rolled biscuit dough, closer to a wine-flavoured shortbread than to anything we would now call a cake. The proportions are workable but the dough is very soft, and that is where most of the attention should go.
- The hinge: chill the pasteWith half a pound of butter and a gill of wine against three-quarters of a pound of flour, the dough will be too slack to roll straight after kneading. Wrap and refrigerate at least an hour, roll about 1/4 inch thick, and chill the cut rounds again before they go in the oven so they hold their edges.
- Weights in cups3/4 lb flour is about 340 g (roughly 2 3/4 cups), and the half-pound each of butter and sugar is 225 g apiece (2 sticks butter, 1 generous cup sugar).
- A gillIn an English book of this date a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 150 ml. Add it in two stages; depending on your flour you may not want the last spoonful.
- The wine"White wine" here most likely means something dry to off-dry and unremarkable rather than a dessert wine. A dry sherry or Madeira would also suit the almond-and-cinnamon finish and give more flavour after baking, since much of the wine's character bakes off.
- Cut it with a glassThe rim of a tumbler served as the cutter here, giving rounds of roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches. A plain cutter of that size does the same job; yield will be somewhere between about 40 and 70 cakes depending on the size of the glass.
- Sugar-almondsThese are sugar-coated almond comfits, crushed coarsely rather than ground. Coarsely chopped almonds mixed with a little crushed sugar or nib sugar gives the same crunch; the cinnamon alternative wants to be mixed with sugar or it will taste harsh.
- Bake of a light colourThe recipe gives no oven heat; around 350F/175C for 12 to 15 minutes works. Take them out when the edges are barely tan and the tops still pale, which is what "light colour" asks for; browning turns the butter-and-wine flavour flat.
- Egg white washBrush thinly and only where you want the sugar to stick. Too heavy a wash pools at the base of the round and sets glassy.
Cassell's ran a long line of "foreign" recipes, and this is one of them: a Danish version of the plain rolled sweet biscuit that turns up across northern Europe under various names. Wine in a biscuit dough was an old northern habit, providing liquid in a paste otherwise stiff with butter; the yolks bind and the reserved whites do duty as glue for the topping, so nothing is wasted. Sugar-almonds — almonds in a hard sugar shell, sold by confectioners and used as much for decoration as for eating — were a standard garnish of the period, and crushing them over a pale biscuit was a cheap way to get both sparkle and crunch. The word "cake" in nineteenth-century British usage still covered small flat baked things of this kind, which is why a recipe that produces a large batch of biscuits is filed under cakes.