Home › C › Cake, Plain, for Children
Cake, Plain, for Children
INGREDIENTS.-1 quartern of dough, lb. of moist sugar, 1/4 lb. of butter or good beef dripping, 1/4 pint of warm milk, 1/24 grated nutmeg or oz. of caraway seeds. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
If you are not in the habit of making bread at home, procure the dough from the baker's, and as soon as it comes in put it into a basin near the fire; cover the basin with a thick cloth, and let the dough remain a little while to rise.
In the meantime, beat the butter to a cream, and make the milk warm; and when the dough has risen, mix with it thoroughly all the above ingredients, and knead the cake well for a few minutes. Butter some cake SEED CAKE. tins, half fill them, and stand them in a warm place, to allow the dough to rise again. When the tins are three-parts full, CAKES, RECIPES FOR. picked, dried in a cloth, and then carefully examined, that no pieces of grit or stone may be left amongst them. They should then be laid on a dish before the fire, to become thoroughly dry; as, if added damp to the other ingredients, cakes will be liable to be heavy.
Good Butter should always be used in the manufacture of cakes; and if required beaten to a cream, it saves much time and labour to warm, but not melt, it before beating.
The heat of the oven is of great importance, especially for large cakes. If the heat be not tolerably fierce, the batter will not rise. If the oven is too quick, and there is any danger of the cake burning or catching, put a sheet of clean white paper over the top.
To know when a cake is sufficiently baked, plunge a clean knife into into the middle of it; draw it quickly out, and if it looks in the least sticky put the cake back, and close the oven door until the cake is done.
Cakes should be kept in closed tin canisters or jars, and in a dry place.
Those made with yeast do not keep so long as those made without it.
A yeast-raised cake built on ordinary bread dough — the old economical way of getting a sweet cake out of baking day. Several of the quantities in this text have lost their figures, so treat the proportions below as the guide.
- A quartern of doughA quartern loaf was made from about 3 1/2 lb of flour and the resulting dough weighs roughly 4 lb. Buying raw dough from a baker is no longer common; an equivalent batch of plain white bread dough, taken after its first rise, does the same job.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts of sugar and of nutmeg or caraway have dropped out of the line — it reads "lb. of moist sugar" and "1/24 grated nutmeg or oz. of caraway seeds." Comparable Victorian dough cakes use about 1/2 lb sugar and 1/2 to 1 oz caraway seed to a quartern of dough, but the figures here cannot be recovered with certainty.
- Moist sugarThis is unrefined soft sugar, closest today to light brown soft sugar. It brings a little molasses flavour and moisture that white granulated will not.
- Beef drippingOffered as the cheap alternative to butter, and it works — the cake is closer to a sweet bread than a sponge. Use good clean beef dripping or lard if you want the period texture; butter gives a milder cake.
- The two risesThe hinge of the method. Enriching dough with fat and sugar slows the yeast considerably, so the second rise in the tins is slower than a plain loaf. Do not rush it with high heat; a warm room and patience give the open crumb this cake depends on.
- OvenThe text is cut off before any oven instruction is given, and the surviving general notes only ask for a heat 'tolerably fierce' enough to make the batter rise. As a modern starting point only, a yeast cake of this size is usually baked around 350-375F for perhaps 40 to 50 minutes in a 2 lb tin, until a skewer comes out clean; neither the temperature nor the time comes from the book.
- Preparing dried fruitThe general notes on washing, drying and picking over currants belong to fruited cakes. Modern packaged dried fruit needs none of it, though a rinse and thorough drying does no harm if the fruit is dusty.
- KeepingThe closing note is accurate and worth heeding: yeast-raised cakes stale within two or three days. Wrap well and eat quickly, or slice and toast it once it firms.
Dough cake was the thrift of the baking household: when a batch of bread dough was set, a portion was pulled aside, worked with butter or dripping, sugar and spice, and baked as a cake. It needed no eggs, no chemical raising agent and no separate purchase of yeast. Regional versions were kept in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the West Country. The instruction to fetch the dough from the baker reflects a real arrangement in Victorian towns, where households without a decent oven bought dough by weight or sent their own tins to the bakehouse to be baked. Caraway was among the commonest English cake flavourings of the period and fell out of favour during the twentieth century, though the reasons for that shift are not documented.