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Drop Cakes
1 cupful butter, 1/2 cupful sugar, 2 eggs, 1 small teaspoonful baking-powder, 1 pint flour, 1 cupful washed and picked currants, 1 teaspoonful each extract nutmeg and lemon, 1/2 cupful milk. Rub the butter and sugar to a white, light cream; add the eggs, beat ten minutes; add the flour and powder sifted together, the milk, and extracts. Mix into a rather firm batter, and drop with a spoon on a greased baking-tin; bake in a quick oven ten minutes.
A plain butter drop cake of the sort baked in tins by the dozen for tea. Two things need attention before you start: the flour is measured by volume as a pint, and the currants are never mentioned again after the ingredient list.
- Fold the currants in lastThe method skips them entirely. Toss the cupful of currants with a spoonful of the measured flour and fold them in after the milk and extracts, so they stay suspended in a stiff batter rather than sinking on the tin.
- A pint of flourFlour sold by volume: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz or 225 to 250 g depending on how it is sifted and settled. This should give a batter that holds its shape on a spoon, not one that spreads.
- A quick ovenReckon on 400-425F (200-220C). At that heat ten minutes is right for small spoonfuls; check at eight, since the high butter content browns the bottoms fast.
- Currants, not berriesThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not fresh red or black currants. "Washed and picked" means rinsing off packing grit and pulling out stems; modern packaged fruit needs neither.
- Extract of nutmegNutmeg essence was among the bottled flavourings sold at the time and is now hard to find. Roughly 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg will stand in for the teaspoonful of extract; lemon extract is still sold as written.
- Beat ten minutesThat timing assumes a wooden spoon and a bowl. Three to four minutes in a stand mixer on medium after the eggs go in should give broadly comparable aeration; longer will only warm the butter and slacken the batter.
- The butter and sugarTwo parts butter to one part sugar is unusually rich and barely sweet by current taste. The cakes will read as a shortbread-ish tea cake rather than a sweet biscuit.
- YieldWalnut-sized spoonfuls spaced two inches apart; the quantities here make a good deal of batter, so expect three dozen or more rather than two. They keep two or three days in a tin and are better the day they are baked.