Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Flaked Wheat Tea Cakes
Flaked Wheat Tea Cakes
1/2 cup sugar or syrup 饮 1/2 cup butter eggs 1 cup Northern flour 1 2 2 cup Ravalli wheat flakes teaspoonfuls baking powder Cream butter and sugar and add eggs (well beaten). Sift flour and baking powder and add 1/2 cup raisins. Add this to first mixture and beat well. Form into small cakes, brush with syrup and water, sprinkle with cocoanut and bake twenty minutes.
A plain creamed-butter drop cake stiffened with wheat flakes, from an era when milled breakfast cereals were sold as baking ingredients as much as porridge. The ingredient list as printed has lost some of its numbers, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than a straight transcription.
- Quantities that no longer read cleanlyThe egg count and the wheat-flake measure are both unreadable in the original, and the sugar line runs into the butter line. For a batter built on 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup sugar, two eggs and about a cup of flakes give a workable dough; anything more is guesswork.
- Ravalli wheat flakesEvidently a brand or trade name for rolled or flaked wheat; 'Ravalli' is a Montana place name, and no such product is sold now. Rolled wheat flakes from a health-food aisle are the direct substitute; old-fashioned rolled oats behave similarly, though they are softer and absorb a little more liquid.
- Northern flourFlour milled from hard red spring wheat grown in the northern plains, higher in protein than soft winter-wheat flour. Bread flour is the nearest match, and all-purpose will do with a slightly more tender result.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives twenty minutes and no heat. Small cakes of this kind belong at 375F; check at fifteen minutes, since the syrup glaze and coconut will color before the centers set.
- Sugar or syrupIf you take the syrup option, reduce nothing else in the recipe as written, but expect a softer, more cake-like crumb and a slightly longer bake. The recipe does not say which syrup; cane or corn syrup is the likeliest reading.
- The glazeBrushing with syrup thinned with water before baking, then dusting with coconut, is the whole finish. Do it just before the tray goes in, and use a light hand or the coconut scorches.
- YieldFormed into cakes of about two tablespoons each, the reconstructed batter makes roughly two dozen, though the count depends on how the missing quantities are filled in. They are tea cakes in the American sense: soft cookies, best the day they are baked.
Books like this one appeared in quantity in the first decades of the twentieth century, when flour mills and cereal companies underwrote community and promotional cookbooks that named their products in the ingredient list. "Ravalli" is a Montana place name, and the flakes and the "Northern flour" together point to a book compiled in the northern wheat belt, where hard spring wheat was a matter of local pride. The recipe belongs to a broader fashion for baking with prepared breakfast cereals, promoted from the 1890s onward as a way to work whole grain into cakes and cookies that would otherwise be made of white flour alone. Raisins and shredded coconut, both cheap and shelf-stable by then, were the standard dress for a homely cake meant for afternoon tea.