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Wonders
(Isle of Jersey.) Beat 1/4 pound of melted butter and 1/4 pound of sugar to a cream. Add 3 beaten eggs, 1 pound of flour, and a little nutmeg. Knead well and set to rise. Cut into large rings, twist these, and fry in boiling fat. Dust with sugar. Real wonder cakes are cut in rounds, then two slits are cut across the centre, and these pieces are twisted without breaking. LOVE CAKES. (Germany. Eaten at Moravian love feasts.) Boil 2 cupfuls of honey and 1 ounce of sugar. Add 4 ounces of chopped almonds and simmer 5 minutes longer, then add 8 ounces of chopped candied peel, 1/2 a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, 1/2 a nutmeg, grated, a pinch of cloves, a teaspoonful of cinnamon, rind of a lemon, grated, and a tablespoonful of rum or sherry. Cut into pieces, 4 x 2 inches large, after adding enough flour to stiffen and rolling it very thin. Bake these in a slow oven, ice with sugar, and eat cold. In Germany they are served with wine to drink, and a bowl of stewed dried apples.
Two recipes run together here: Jersey Wonders, a fried twisted dough, and Moravian Love Cakes, a honey-and-peel Lebkuchen. Both are workable, but each has a gap in the original that needs filling before you start.
- No leavening is listed for the WondersThe instruction to "set to rise" implies a leaven, but none appears in the ingredients — a common omission in books of this era. Recipes for Jersey Wonders vary: many later ones are raised with baking powder or self-raising flour rather than yeast, and a dough raised that way needs only a short rest rather than a proof.
- Weights to volumeA quarter pound of butter is 1 stick or 1/2 cup; a quarter pound of sugar is a scant 2/3 cup; a pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups. Three eggs and that much fat will not hydrate a full pound of flour in every kitchen — hold back a half cup and add it only if the dough is sticky.
- "Boiling fat"Means deep fat, in modern terms around 360-375F. Lard was a common frying medium; any neutral high-smoke-point oil works. They are usually turned once and come out pale gold rather than brown.
- The twistCut a round, make two parallel slits across the centre, then pull one end back through the slits so the piece turns inside out without tearing — the usual reading of the recipe's "twisted without breaking". Roll it thin; too thick and it will not cook through at the twist.
- "A slow oven" for the Love Cakes300F. These are a honey dough, which scorches quickly — bake until firm at the edges and barely coloured, 12-18 minutes depending on thickness.
- Flour quantity for the Love Cakes is not givenYou add "enough flour to stiffen," which for two cups of honey plus the nuts and peel will be several cups; add it by feel. Work it in while the honey mixture is still warm; once cold it stiffens and is hard to roll.
- Order of operationsThe original tells you to cut the pieces before mentioning the flour. Read it backwards: stiffen with flour, roll very thin, then cut to 4 x 2 inches.
- Candied peelEight ounces is a large proportion by modern taste. Mixed candied citron, orange and lemon peel suits the recipe; commercial "fruit cake mix" with glacé cherries does not.
- Yield and keepingThe Wonders make roughly two dozen and are best within hours of frying. The Love Cakes make about three dozen bars and, like all honey Lebkuchen, improve after a week in a tin, softening as they take up moisture.
Jersey Wonders — des mèrvelles in Jèrriais — are among the island's best-known baking, sold at fairs and made in quantity for family gatherings; islanders will tell you the batch should be fried only on an incoming tide, or the fat will boil over, which is folklore rather than physics. The twisted-and-pulled-through shape is an old one across Europe, appearing as Scandinavian klenäter. The Love Cakes belong to a different tradition entirely: the Moravian Church, whose Liebesmahl or love feast is a simple communal meal of a sweetened bun or cake and a drink, distinct from Holy Communion rather than a substitute for it, and carried from Herrnhut in Saxony to Moravian settlements in England and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century.