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Kentish Cake
¼ pound butter ¼ pound castor sugar ¼ pound Five Roses flour 3 eggs 1 ounce grated chocolate 1 ounce ground almonds 1 ounce dessicated cocoanut ¼ teaspoon vanilla.
Cream butter and sugar Add gradually flour and the 3 eggs, beating the mixture for several minutes after each egg is added Stir in the grated chocolate, almonds and cocoanut. Flavor with vanilla or other flavoring. Butter a flat round cake tin, line with but ered paper and put cake mixture into it spreading it evenly over tin.
Bake 30 or 40 minutes.
When cold, cover with chocolate icing.
A quarter-pound cake in the old English style, with chocolate, almond and coconut stirred through. There is no chemical leavening, so the beating is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: beat for the liftNothing here raises the cake but air and egg. Add the eggs one at a time and beat several minutes after each, as written, so the batter stays pale, thick and glossy rather than curdling into the butter.
- WeightsA quarter pound is 4 oz, about 115 g, of butter, sugar and flour alike; 1 oz is about 30 g. The proportions are close to the classic four-quarters pound cake, scaled down.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and quicker to dissolve into the butter. Granulated works if you cream it longer.
- Grated chocolateBlock chocolate grated on a fine grater rather than chopped; unsweetened baking chocolate is the likeliest reading, though sweeter eating chocolate was also grated into cakes. Chill the bar first and it will shred instead of smearing; chips are too coarse and will sink.
- Desiccated cocoanutUnsweetened fine-shred dried coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for topping. Sweetened coconut will push the cake noticeably sugary.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in this recipe. A moderate oven for a cake of this kind is around 350F.
- Tin and liningA flat round tin, something in the region of 8 to 9 inches, gives the thin, evenly spread layer the recipe wants. The buttered paper can be parchment; butter the tin, lay in a paper round, butter that too.
- TimingThe recipe's 30 to 40 minutes suits a deeper tin; a thin layer at 350F may well be done sooner. Test with a skewer at the centre and pull it as soon as it comes out clean, since an eggy batter with no leavening dries fast.
- Yield and finishingOne layer, roughly eight to ten slices. It is iced cold with chocolate icing, so make the icing while the cake cools rather than after.
The quarter-pound-of-everything formula behind this cake is the old English pound cake reduced to household scale, the same arithmetic the French call quatre-quarts: equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and egg, raised by beating alone. Names like "Kentish" attached loosely to such cakes in late Victorian and Edwardian recipe collections and rarely indicate a documented regional original; Kent was known for its cobnuts, cherries and hops rather than for chocolate and coconut, and the almond, grated chocolate and desiccated coconut here are all signs of a much later kitchen, when imported groceries had become cheap and reliable. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by a Canadian flour miller and assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the flour, which is why English-sounding cakes of this sort sit beside prairie breads and preserves, and why the instructions assume a cook who already knows what a moderate oven feels like.