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Queen Cakes
Half pound flour, three ounces butter, four ounces powdered sugar, two eggs, one gill milk, two tablespoons currants, half teaspoon baking powder and the juice of half a sound lemon.
Knead the butter with a wooden spoon to a cream in a bowl, dredge in the flour, add the sugar and currants. Mix the ingredients well together, then break in the eggs and beat the whole well together for five minutes. Add the baking powder; gently mix. Lightly butter a small tin; pour the preparation into the tin and set in the hot oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, cut the cake into six equal pieces and serve.
A plain English currant cake in miniature, written loosely enough that two ingredients get lost between the list and the method. Read the whole thing before starting.
- The milk and the lemon juiceBoth appear in the ingredient list and never again in the instructions. Add the gill of milk and the lemon juice with the eggs, before the five minutes of beating, and hold back a little of the milk in case the batter loosens too far.
- Weights and measuresHalf a pound of flour is about 2 cups or 225 g; three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons; four ounces of sugar is a scant 2/3 cup. A gill is half a cup by American measure, though the imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period this means finely ground granulated sugar, sometimes called caster sugar today, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Caster or ordinary granulated is the right substitution.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Two tablespoons is a modest scattering for this quantity of batter.
- "Hot oven"Around 400°; small tin twenty minutes at 375° to 400°F will do; test with a skewer at eighteen.
- Order of the baking powderThe leavening goes in last, after five minutes of vigorous beating, and is only gently mixed. Whatever the reasoning, follow it: mix it in gently and get the tin into the oven promptly.
- The tinA "small tin" here means something like a 6 or 7 inch square or round pan. Queen cakes were classically baked in individual patty or heart-shaped tins, which is closer to the original spirit; muffin cups will bake in about 15 minutes.
- YieldSix pieces, as stated — a tea cake for a small table rather than a party cake.
Queen cakes were a fixture of English baking from the eighteenth century onward: a light currant cake, richer than a bun and plainer than a pound cake, usually baked in small fluted or heart-shaped tins and eaten at tea. The name is generally traced to the reign of Queen Anne, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and early receipts vary widely in richness — some are nearly all butter and egg, others, like this one, are thinned out with milk and lifted with chemical leavening, which only became common in domestic baking after the middle of the nineteenth century.