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Three Eggs (Quarter of a teaspoonful)
Quarter of a teaspoonful of Bakingpowder.
Cream the butter and sugar, then add the eggs and flour by degrees, then the fruit, peel, and other ingredients; put this mixture into small queen cake tins, and bake a pale brown in a moderate oven from fifteen to twenty minutes.
This is a page fragment: the ingredient list has been cut off by the page break, leaving only the tail of it in the title and the first line. What survives is the method for small queen cakes, and it is workable if you supply proportions from any standard creamed pound-cake formula.
- The missing quantitiesAll that survives is the tail of the ingredient list: three eggs (in the heading) and a quarter teaspoon of baking powder. Rich creamed cake recipes of this type commonly used roughly equal weights of butter, sugar and flour balanced against the eggs, which for three eggs would suggest something in the region of 6 oz each of butter, caster sugar and flour, with currants and chopped candied peel to taste. These figures are a working reconstruction, not the recipe's own.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). At that sort of heat small cakes in shallow tins should be set and pale gold within the fifteen to twenty minutes given; a hotter oven risks browning the edges before the centres are done.
- Queen cake tinsSmall shallow patty tins, often fluted and sometimes heart-shaped or oval, holding only a spoonful or two of batter. Modern mini-muffin or bun tins are the closest equivalent; a standard twelve-cup muffin tin is larger and will need correspondingly longer.
- Why so little baking powderThe lift here comes chiefly from air beaten into the creamed butter and sugar and from the eggs. The quarter teaspoon is insurance, not the raising agent, so creaming properly matters more than anything else in the method.
- PeelCandied citron, orange and lemon peel, bought in whole slabs in the period and chopped at home. Ready-chopped mixed peel works; rinse and dry very sticky sugared peel or it will sink.
- "Other ingredients"The phrase must refer to flavourings listed above the page break. In recipes of this class those were typically things like grated lemon rind, a little brandy or rosewater, or a pinch of ground mace or nutmeg; what this one specified cannot be recovered.
- Adding eggs and flour by degreesAlternate them. Beating three eggs into creamed butter all at once will curdle the mixture; a spoonful of the weighed flour with each addition of egg keeps it smooth.
- YieldSomething in the region of two dozen small cakes, depending on the size of the tins. Small rich cakes of this kind dry out quickly and are best eaten within a day or two, or kept in a tin, where the fruit helps hold some moisture.
Queen cakes were a fixture of English baking from the early eighteenth century onward, appearing in Hannah Glasse and in nearly every household manual that followed: a rich creamed butter batter with currants, baked in small tins rather than as a single loaf. The name is often said to attach the cake to a queen, though the connection to any particular queen is folklore rather than record. The instruction to bake them only "a pale brown" belongs to the same tradition: at a good table these small cakes were expected to look delicate, and a browned edge marked a careless oven.