Land of our Sojourn: Tea Cake: Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #10

For background on the Historical Food Fortnightly, click here.

The Challenge: Let Them Eat Cake! October 5 - October 18
The 16th is the anniversary of the beheading of Marie Antoinette (zut alors!). In honor of Madame Deficit, prepare your best cake from a historic recipe. And then eat it, bien sur.

True confession: I don't really like cake. If I do eat it, it needs to be super moist, like a carrot cake (really, I like the cake part ok but it's all about the cream cheese frosting). I can't stand eating sheet cakes. At our wedding, we didn't have a cake. So I wasn't overly looking forward to this challenge. But I decided to make the Tea Cake recipe after making the Cup Cake recipe last challenge and since I don't have pearlash, I used baking soda instead. My adventure resulted in mixed success, as you shall see.

This was the disaster part of the challenge attempt.

The Recipe: Tea Cake, The American Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those who are Not Ashamed of Economy, Lydia Child, 1841, (p. 71 in this edition.)

The Date/Year and Region: Recipe is English, published 1841 in New York.

How Did You Make It: At first I was going to go with a 1/3 recipe, but at the last minute I decided to go for a full recipe to use up more of the sour milk we had on hand. I should have stuck with my initial idea. I simply creamed the sugar and butter, then added the eggs, then the milk, then a spoonful of baking soda instead of pearlash, then the flour, two cups at a time. It was a little stiff, so I added a smidge more milk since I was trying to use it all up. (Interesting side note: period bakers would have known to use sour milk to activate the pearlash. Here's an interesting blogpost from another Historical Food Fortnightly participant on historical leavening agents.) I also threw in a huge spoonful of cinnamon because I thought it would taste good and there was no spice included (I suppose because it's supposed to be a frugal cake. I was going for taste.) I did use a modern hand mixer. This made up a really big batch of batter, bigger than I had anticipated.

Time to Complete: I have completely forgotten about tracking this piece of things....but I'm estimating about 20 minutes with interruptions to mix it up. I had to bake it in two pans and the first one baked for about 40 minutes at around 350-400 (temp varied in my oven, I was going for 350 but sometimes when I checked it was high). The second part went into disaster and consumed about 1.5 hours. I haven't counted the clean up time yet, that is probably another hour.

Total Cost: Around $6-7. Everything came from the pantry, but I think about $2 for the butter, 50 cents for the milk, 75 cents for the eggs, 25 cents for the sugar, and $2.50 for the flour. Negligible cost for cinnamon and baking soda. This made a 9x13 pan plus another pan that is larger than an 8x8 but I am not sure of the exact dimensions.

How Successful Was It?: The pan that baked well was moist and tasty, though not particularly appealing to look at. It rose and then fell fast and hard, so I added a little more baking soda to the second pan. In retrospect, that was probably not a good idea. While both pans had been filled to approximately halfway, the extra baking soda encouraged a high rise that bubbled over the edges of the second pan (approx 9x13). This was after the first issue of having our gas tank run out- ovens here in Peru run off something similar to a propane gas tank. You don't know until you go check on things and realize your oven temp is at 150 F and you were aiming for 350. You con your husband into changing to the backup tank after you can't figure out how to do it and run in the house to reheat the oven, hoping it isn't too late. Only then do you realize after another 10 minutes that the burning smell from the oven isn't a good thing and you realize the extra baking soda gave the batter life....life that it spent escaping the confines of your glass baking dish. You wait, figuring how bad can it be? It probably only needs another 10-15 minutes to bake what remains in the pan. Unfortunately, things can be very bad. All that butter, sugar, and egg make a lot of smoke on the bottom of your oven. So, you call a time-out, scrape the offending mixture from the bottom of the oven and the metal wires it coated on the way down, and put your pan back in for another 10 minutes. You fail to hear the timer as you are attempting to wrestle your children into bed, and when you remember (mainly because your eldest asks, "Mom, what is that smell?") and you sprint down the stairs to check on the cake, your husband tells you, "It's done," in a tone of voice that indicates there will be no resurrection for this particular cake. The oven is turned off, smoke hangs in the air, and you leave the whole mess in the oven for "tomorrow is another day."

How Accurate Is It?: I used modern tools. I didn't have pearlash and used baking soda. The ratios were correct and it doesn't taste like a regular cake (I actually much prefer it to a regular cake.) I would be curious to bake this again back home in the States with my consistent gas oven and more space in the dish and see how it goes. I have a hunch this would bake well in a stoneware dish.

Interpretation: I used my homemade Gluten Free flour blend in this because everyone else in the family is gluten free and it just seems mean to make baked goods they can't eat. Details are in my post on the Cup Cake.

Time to Research: 5 minutes or less, when another participant commented on my Cup Cake post that I could use baking soda, I knew exactly what I was going to make next.

The ingredients

Batter after creaming butter and sugar and adding eggs. I had to change bowls after the butter and sugar only, the first one I used was nowhere large enough.

The batter seemed like it would work well in these two pans.

I sent the smaller pan in as a test. Not much to look at, but it's a moist, tender, chewy tasty cake. Kind of like half baked cookies, which is probably why I liked it.