HFF 6.23: Sweets for the Sweet

 

The Challenge: Sweets for the Sweet. Make something sweet!

The Recipe: Great Cake (12th Night Cake) from Elinor Fettisplace's Receipt Book (edited by Hilary Spurling)

The Date/Year and Region: c.1590, English

 

How Did You Make It: I followed the modern 'translation', which primarily is a 1/8 reduced scale version of the given ingredients (the main difference is that no specific quantity is given for the sugar in the original). I started by weighing out the flour, adding the ginger, cinnamon and dried currants, then making a 'posset' with ale and milk and sugar, and starting the yeast in that. After the yeast proofed, I combined the dry and wet ingredients, kneaded the dough, and left it rise for an hour. After beating down the dough, I shaped it into individual rolls, and let those rise for an hour, then baked at 350F for about 30 minutes.

 

Time to Complete: With rise time, about 4 hours.

 

Total Cost: About $5 for the currants and beer; everything else on hand.

 

How Successful Was It?: Fine. It tasted like cinnamon raisin bread, but not all that sweet. Compared to the later Twelfth Cake recipes I've tried, this one was much more bread-like in texture, as well as being much less sweet, and having much less fruit. Which is to say, it made tasty rolls which kept well, but comes across as rather lacking for a cake. I was hoping to make this for a 16th century Twelfth Night party, and now I'm rethinking whether I should use a 19th century recipe instead. At the very least, I think that adding the rosewater-sugar glaze that the editor suggests (from Lady Elinor's marchpane receipt) would make it a bit more sweet and festive, though I'm tempted to add more sugar and/or some honey to the cake itself to make it sweeter.

How Accurate Is It? The historic instructions and modern ones are very similar, save only that the modern ones specify a particularly (small) amount of sugar should be added to the yeast posset, where the historic version just calls for 'some' sugar near the end of the recipe. I read it as rather ambiguous about whether the sugar goes in/on the cake near the end of the process, or if it's meant to be feeding the year from the outset. I did use a 2:1 ratio of ale to milk, simply because I didn't have any use for the leftovers; this didn't cause the cake to have a noticeable ale-flavor or aroma, so I think it was inconsequential. I did intentionally make this up as 12 smaller individual servings rather than a single great cake, but that was purely for ease of serving at my Lord of the Rings party.

The only frame of reference I have for early modern Twelfth Cake is Ruth Goodman's version from Tudor Monastery Farm, and while hers is likewise more of an enriched bread with fruit and spice than it is a modern cake, I don't know enough about her sources to make a definite judgement.

Adequate, if not 'great', cakes