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Cheapest Cake Without Eggs
2 pounds of light-bread dough. 8 ounces of sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 1 teaspoonful of carraway seeds. 1 pound of flour.
The difference between this and the preceding kind is that this makes a soft dough, to be handled and kneaded like bread, then baked in moulds. Brush over with a little meited lard when setting to rise.
These raised cakes are like fresh bread, cannot be sliced till a day or two old, without waste.
Once upon a time, so they say, an economical man fitted out his cow with a pair of green glass specta cles, and thus induced her to eat shavings, which looked like hay.
In the warm, moist gardens of the south of England the camomile flowers make pretty borders, and saffron grows like a weed. An infusion of saffron gives the color of eggs to cake, and the people who are glad there to sell their new-laid eggs are very well content with the substitute. Perhaps saffron also gives something of the taste of eggs. Italian vermicelli is colored with it.
This is a yeast-raised sweet bread built on a piece of ordinary bread dough, not a batter cake. Treat it as enriched bread throughout and the method makes sense.
- "Light-bread dough"Plain risen white yeast dough, unsweetened and unenriched — a common standby in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Two pounds is about the dough from 5 cups of flour; a bought pound of pizza or bread dough, doubled, stands in acceptably.
- The hinge: work the butter and sugar in slowlySugar and fat at this ratio will tear a fully risen dough and slow the yeast badly. Add the softened butter and sugar in several additions, kneading each in before the next, then knead the extra pound of flour in until the mass is smooth and only slightly tacky.
- Expect a long riseAn enriched, sugared dough proofs far more slowly than the bread dough it came from. Allow two to three hours at warm room temperature for the moulds to fill, not the 45 minutes a lean dough would want.
- Brushing with lardMost likely a skin-prevention measure rather than a flavouring; it would keep the surface from drying and cracking during a slow rise. Melted butter or neutral oil does the same job; cover loosely as well.
- Moulds and ovenBake in loaf tins or deep round tins filled about two-thirds. The original gives no temperature; a raised sweet dough of this size wants a moderate oven, 350–375F, for 35–45 minutes, to an internal 190F.
- CarawayOne teaspoon in roughly four pounds of dough (the two pounds of bread dough plus the added flour, sugar and butter) is a light background note by period standards. Caraway in sweet raised cake was thoroughly conventional in English and American baking and is not a mistake.
- The saffronThe closing paragraph is an aside, not an instruction — no saffron appears in the ingredient list. If you want the yellow it describes, steep a good pinch of threads in a few tablespoons of warm milk and knead that liquid in; it colours convincingly and tastes nothing like egg.
- Yield and keepingAbout two standard loaves. The note about slicing is accurate: eggless raised cake crumbles when fresh and cuts cleanly on the second or third day. Wrap it once cool rather than leaving it exposed.
Eggless cakes of this kind belong to a long tradition of "dough cakes" — the housewife pinching off part of the day's bread dough and enriching it with whatever sugar, fat, fruit or seed was to hand, so that a cake cost almost nothing beyond what the bread already cost. Eggs were seasonal and saleable, and in a period when they fetched cash at market a cake that used none was worth printing. The digression about saffron reflects a real practice: saffron was grown in England for centuries, most famously around Saffron Walden in Essex, and West Country saffron cake and buns are still made with it, prized as much for the yellow crumb as the flavour. The author's suggestion that saffron might also supply "something of the taste of eggs" is the author's own speculation rather than received wisdom, and the story of the cow in green spectacles is offered, plainly enough, as a joke at the expense of false economy.