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Twelfth Night Cake
(England.) Beat 2 pounds butter with 2 pounds powdered sugar, 1 nutmeg grated, 1/4 ounce each of cinnamon, mace, ginger, and allspice. Beat 10 minutes, add slowly 20 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, and beat for 10 minutes more. Add 2 pounds flour, 4 pounds currants, 1/2 pound chopped almonds, 1/2 pound each of chopped lemon and orange candied peel, and citron, and a glass of brandy. Bake, in a pan 1/2 full, lined with paper, 4 1/2 hours. Will keep 2 months.
This is a full-sized Victorian Twelfth cake: roughly eleven pounds of batter before it goes near the oven, with no chemical leavening at all. Everything depends on air beaten into the butter and eggs, and on a long, slow bake.
- Scale it down or split itThe full quantity comes to something over 14 lb of batter before baking, and the recipe directs that the pan be filled only half full, so no single domestic tin will take it. Quartering the recipe (8 oz butter, 8 oz sugar, 5 eggs, 8 oz flour, 1 lb currants) is far easier to manage in a domestic mixer.
- Oven temperatureThe original names no oven heat at all. A rich fruit cake of this size wants a slow oven: 300F, or 275F for the full-sized cake; 4 1/2 hours at anything hotter will give you a black crust over a raw centre.
- Lining the pan"Lined with paper" means a double thickness of parchment on base and sides, standing an inch above the rim, and it is not optional over four hours. Wrapping the outside of the tin in a collar of brown paper, which period recipes often call for, slows the edges further.
- Spice quantitiesA quarter ounce of a ground spice is about 1 tablespoon, so this carries roughly 4 tablespoons of mixed spice plus a whole grated nutmeg (2-3 teaspoons). Mace is the outer sheath of the nutmeg, milder and more floral; ground mace is a fair substitute if you cannot get blades.
- A glass of brandyA wineglass in these books is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Quartered, that is about a tablespoon, which is little more than flavouring — the cake keeps because of its sugar and fruit, not the spirit.
- The 10 minutes of beatingBoth beating stages are the leavening. Cream butter, sugar and spice until visibly pale, then add the beaten yolks gradually. The original then calls for a further 10 minutes of beating; folding the whipped whites in last instead will preserve more of the volume you have just built.
- Adding the fruitToss the currants, almonds, peel and citron with a spoonful of the weighed flour before folding them in; otherwise four pounds of fruit sinks straight to the base of a batter this loose.
- Testing and keepingA skewer to the centre should come out clean with no wet crumb; a quartered cake will want considerably less than the stated 4 1/2 hours, perhaps 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Cool completely in the tin, then wrap in parchment and foil; the claimed two months' keeping is plausible for a cake this rich in a cool cupboard.
- FinishingThe recipe stops at the bake, but a Twelfth cake was almost always covered in almond paste and hard white icing before it came to table. Plain, it eats as a dense fruit cake.
Twelfth Night — usually 5 January, though the name is also applied to the 6th, Epiphany itself — closed the English Christmas season, and the cake was its centrepiece: enormously rich, heavily iced, and often crowned with paper or sugar figures. The custom generally traced back to earlier European Epiphany cakes was to hide a bean and a pea in the batter, whoever found them ruling the evening's revels as King and Queen; by the nineteenth century the token was often a coin or charm, and confectioners' windows in London were famous for their display of decorated Twelfth cakes. Victorian moralising about disorderly Twelfth Night parties, and the growing dominance of Christmas Day itself, pushed the celebration into decline, and the same spiced-fruit batter survived instead as the British Christmas cake and the wedding cake. Its appearance here, labelled simply "(England.)", suggests a cake that had become more a piece of English tradition than a thing most English households still baked on the day.