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Nut and Raisin Tea Cakes
Prepare plain Tea Cakes, stirring into the flour, one-third cup each chopped raisins and nuts. Cover with Plain Confectioner's Icing.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's plain tea cake batter and its confectioner's icing in front of you. A few details are worth pinning down before you start.
- What a tea cake is hereIn American cookbooks the term covers several things, from a small individual cake baked in gem or cupcake pans to a plain cookie; the fact that this one is iced and takes a batter stirred with fruit points to a small cake rather than a cookie. Since the book's own plain tea cake recipe is not reproduced here, treat any proportions as a guess: a creamed butter-and-sugar batter leavened with baking powder is the likely form.
- Add the fruit to the flour, not the batterThe instruction to stir the raisins and nuts "into the flour" follows the usual mixing order for such batters, and coating them in dry flour before the liquid goes in is generally held to help keep them suspended rather than settling to the bottom of each cake.
- MeasureOne-third cup chopped raisins is about 2 oz; one-third cup chopped nuts about 1 1/2 oz. Walnuts, pecans or hickory nuts all suit the period; almonds are drier and worth chopping finer.
- OvenSmall cakes of this type generally bake around 375F for 18 to 22 minutes. If your base recipe gives only a vague direction such as "a moderate oven," that is usually taken as somewhere in the 350 to 375F range; at the lower end allow closer to 25 minutes.
- Plain confectioner's icingIcing of this name is typically sifted powdered sugar moistened to a spreading consistency: roughly 1 cup sugar to 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons milk, cream or hot water, often with a few drops of vanilla. Ice the cakes only when fully cool or the glaze soaks in and disappears.
- RaisinsRaisins of the era were often sold still seeded, and were not necessarily as moist as modern packaged fruit. Modern seedless raisins need no soaking, though a brief plumping in hot water, then thorough draining and drying, gives a softer crumb.
- YieldIf the base batter is of the usual household size, expect it to fill somewhere in the range of a dozen muffin cups; the added fruit and nuts will stretch it a little further.
Tea cakes belonged to the afternoon and evening end of the day rather than to dinner: a plate of small iced cakes was a common accompaniment to tea or coffee served to callers. Cookbooks of the period were often built economically, with one plain foundation batter followed by a column of one-line variations, so that a single mastered recipe yielded several named cakes. Raisins and shelled nuts were convenient additions, both keeping well in the pantry.