Fine cakes (medieval/elizabethan)

25 servings

Ingredients

Quantity Ingredient
6 ounces Butter (1 1/2 sticks) -- at
Room temperature
½ cup Sugar
1 Egg yolk -- beaten
1¾ cup Sifted flour
½ teaspoon Cloves
⅛ teaspoon Mace
pinch Ground saffron
Egg white

Directions

To make fine Cakes--Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as you would a Pasty of Venison, and when it is baked it will be full of clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer.

Then take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your cakes. The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little. Lay paper under them. --John Partridge, The Widowes Treasure In the sixteenth century, if your cake was "dough on both sides," your project had certainly failed, for the most delectable cake was a crisp and crumbly, spicy shortbread like this one.

1. In a bowl, cream butter. Add sugar and beat until fluffy. 2. Add egg yolk and beat until thoroughly blended. 3. In another bowl, combine sifted flour and spices, stirring to distribute evenly. 4.

Sift dry ingredients into bowl containing butter-and-sugar mixture.

Combine by stirring or with hands. 5. Press mixture into a 9-inch square baking pan. 6. Brush top lightly with egg white. 7. Bake at 325F for 45 minutes or until cake feels firm when pressed lightly in the center. 8. Cut into squares while cake is still hot. 9. Cool in pan on wire rack.

Yield: 25 small "cakes"

To The Queen's Taste by Lorna J. Sass "Desserts" ISBN--0-87099-151-5 Posted by Tiffany Hall-Graham

Recipe By : To The Queen's Taste by Lorna J. Sass "Desserts" From: Marjorie Scofield Date: 04-23-95 (160) Fido: Recipes

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