Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Yorkshire Tea Cakes
Yorkshire Tea Cakes
Rub 6 ounces butter with 2 pounds flour, 2 eggs well beaten, 1 pint milk, and 1 ounce German yeast. Knead and cover, and set to rise. Divide into ten cakes, rolled thin and cut round, set to rise. Bake 1/2 hour. Serve hot.
A plain yeasted tea cake — closer to a soft bread roll than to anything sweet. The dough is straightforward; the two things needing attention are the yeast conversion and the baking time.
- German yeastThis is compressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes. One ounce (28 g) is equivalent to roughly 3 teaspoons (10 g) of instant dried yeast, or about 14 g of active dry. That is a generous quantity for 2 lb of flour and will give a fast, distinctly yeasty rise.
- Weights2 lb flour is about 900 g; 6 oz butter is 170 g. Use bread flour or a strong plain flour for the chew these are meant to have.
- Which pintThe pint is ambiguous: 16 fl oz (475 ml) or the imperial 20 fl oz (570 ml). Start with 475 ml warm milk and add more only if the dough will not come together — 900 g flour with two eggs takes hydration well but the dough should stay kneadable.
- The missing saltNo salt is listed, though the recipe plainly needs it. Without it the cakes taste flat and the yeast runs away with the dough. Add about 2 teaspoons (12 g).
- Baking timeHalf an hour is far too long for thin rounds. At 400°F they need 12 to 15 minutes — until risen, pale gold and hollow-sounding underneath.
- Rolled thinRoll to about 1 cm and cut rounds of 10–12 cm. They puff considerably on the second rise and again in the oven, so thin here does not mean cracker-thin.
- Two risesThe first rise takes about an hour in a warm room; the shaped cakes need 30 to 40 minutes more, until visibly swollen but not slack.
- Yield and servingTen cakes, as stated. Serve hot, or split and toast them the next day with butter — the usual Yorkshire treatment.
Yorkshire tea cakes are a yeast-raised bread of the north of England, eaten split, toasted and buttered at tea; the currants that many people now expect in them are optional and absent here, leaving a plain enriched roll. The recipe's tell is German yeast, the nineteenth-century British term for imported compressed yeast, which over the later nineteenth century increasingly took the place of the barm skimmed from ale for domestic baking — a shift that made quick, reliable home bread easier to achieve.