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Scotch Seed Cake
Takes five hours time to make, raise, and bake, using dough to begin with. 2 pounds of light-bread dough. 12 ounces of sugar. 12 ounces of butter. 4 eggs. 1 teaspoonful of carraway seeds. 8 ounces of flour. Weigh out the dough at 7 in the morning. Set it with the butter and sugar in a warm place. At about 9 work all together and beat in the eggs one at a time, and add the carraway. Give it another half hour to stand and become smooth, then add the flour and give the whole ten minutes beating. It makes a stiff batter--not dough.
Put it in two buttered cake moulds. Rise about an hour. It should not be too light, bake as you would bread, in a slack oven, less than an hour.
This is a yeast-risen cake built on bread dough rather than baking powder, so the schedule matters more than the oven. The timings in the original assume a warm bakeshop; in a cool modern kitchen everything stretches.
- The hinge: do not overproof"It should not be too light" is the whole instruction. A fully proofed batter collapses under the weight of the butter and sugar and bakes coarse and dry. Aim for a visibly puffed but still dense batter, roughly half again its original volume, rather than doubled.
- Slack ovenThe recipe's own term; a slack oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 300F, and no hotter than about 325F. The high sugar and butter content browns fast, so anything hotter sets the crust before the crumb finishes. Reckon on 45-55 minutes for two moulds.
- Light-bread doughPlain white yeast bread dough taken at the end of its first rise, before shaping. Two pounds is about the dough from 4 to 4 1/2 cups of flour. Any lean straight dough works; use one with no added fat or sweetening, since the recipe supplies both.
- Butter and sugar in a warm placeThe two-hour rest from 7 to 9 lets the butter soften to the point where it will work into the dough without tearing it, while the dough goes on fermenting. Do not let the butter melt or the batter will break when the eggs go in.
- Weights, not cupsEverything here is by weight and should stay that way: 12 oz sugar is about 1 3/4 cups, 12 oz butter is three sticks, 8 oz flour is roughly 1 3/4 cups. The dough itself can only be measured on a scale.
- Cake mouldsTwo buttered 8-inch round pans or two 8x4-inch loaf pans. Butter them heavily; a sweet yeast batter sticks.
- CarawayOne teaspoon in a cake this size is modest beside many period seed cakes, which often call for considerably more. Crush a portion of the seed lightly if you want the flavor through the crumb rather than in occasional bursts.
- ServingTwo loaves, 10 to 12 slices each. It is a bread-textured cake, best the day it is baked and good toasted with butter after that.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving British cake types, and caraway is the seed meant whenever the name appears unqualified. Versions like this one, leavened with a piece of bread dough and enriched with butter, sugar and eggs, are the older form: they predate chemical leavening and sit halfway between a sweet bread and a cake, which is why the recipe tells you to bake it as you would bread. The seed cake is traditionally associated with sowing and harvest, often said to have been made for farm workers at the end of the wheat sowing, and caraway is generally said to have kept its place in Scottish and northern English baking after dried fruit and spice came to dominate elsewhere.