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Bakewell Cheese Cakes
Weight of an egg in castor sugar, butter and Five Roses flour Pinch of baking powder 1 egg ¼ teaspoon grated lemon rind 1 tablespoon jam Rough puff pastry (rule given elsewhere) Line a dozen small patty pans with rough puff pastry. Put in centre of each ½ teaspoon jam, Beat butter and sugar to cream, add the egg alternately with the flour. Lastly, add the lemon rind and baking powder. Put a teaspoon of this mixture on top of the jam. Bake in moderate oven 15 minutes. Serve with castor sugar sprinkled over. This quantity will require ½ pound pastry.
A weight-based sponge filling over jam in a pastry case — the sort of recipe that assumes you own a balance scale and a set of patty pans. Two details need translating before you start.
- "Weight of an egg"Weigh a whole egg in its shell, then match that weight in each of sugar, butter and flour. A modern large egg runs about 2 oz (55-60 g), so you are looking at roughly 2 oz each — a small creamed batter that just covers twelve tarts.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than icing sugar. Granulated will work in the batter; for the sprinkling at the end, pulse granulated briefly in a spice grinder or use superfine.
- Patty pansShallow individual tart tins, closer to a mini-muffin tin than a standard 12-cup muffin pan. If your tins are deeper, expect fewer than twelve and a longer bake.
- Moderate ovenAround 350°F.
- Half a pound of pastry8 oz. Older recipes are not always clear whether such a figure means the finished dough or the flour it was made from; a single sheet of bought all-butter puff is about the right order of quantity.
- Adding egg and flour alternatelyWith one egg and only 2 oz of flour, this means a spoonful of beaten egg, a spoonful of flour, repeating. It is there to stop the creamed butter curdling; the baking powder goes in at the very end so it is not overworked.
- Jam quantityHalf a teaspoon per tart is deliberately mean. More jam will boil up around the sponge and weld the tarts to the tin. Raspberry or strawberry is traditional.
- Yield and timingTwelve small tarts. Fifteen minutes is right for shallow tins; test that the sponge springs back and the pastry base is coloured underneath, not just set on top.
The name is a double puzzle: there is no cheese, and the Bakewell most people know is a tart or pudding, not a cheese cake. "Cheesecake" in older English cookery simply meant a small filled pastry he the nnineteenth century the word had drifted to cover any little tart with a rich, set filling. The dish is generally traced to Bakewell in Derbyshire, and the often-repeated story of a cook at the Rutland Arms accidentally spreading egg mixture over jam instead of stirring it into pastry is traditional rather than documented. Classic Bakewell fillings are almond-based; this version, from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company's promotional flour book, substitutes lemon rind and leans on a plain creamed sponge.