Short and Tweet 4 Challenge: Top tea cakes
This week’s #shortandtweet Top tea cakes challenge from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet (pp 88-9) gave a spicy Winter baking scent to our home and I daresay that of our immediate neighbours.
I selected the Top tea cakes recipe because it’s not something that I would ordinarily bake (and, as matters turned out, I didn’t - not really). It seems that BakeCakeCrumbs of Cake, Crumbs and Cooking felt likewise so was pleased that the challenge served as a push to getting round to it. The challenge write-up usefully details the substitutions, cutting the quantities to a third of the recipe and reflections on reducing the oven temperature because of the rapid browning of the sweet dough mix. It also seems that we think as one on the topic of mixed peel: ready-chopped from baking aisles = typically vile but chopping candied peel = very successful.
Carla Tomasi showed typical flair in baking this week’s most stylish tea cakes. Apparently it is the ‘mother’ recipe, not the panettone variation that Dan Lepard suggests, but she baked it in “baby panettone cases because [she] doubled [the] recipe and needed vertical space”. I’m not sure if there’s an additional glazing on these tea cakes or if I’m seeing them through a craving-filtered lens of my own. Having seen Carla’s I’d like to try these out with the panettone variation that Dan Lepard suggests for this recipe.
Update: Twitter conversation reveals that there is a plain icing glaze on these stylish lovelies.
Tony Inga of Pane Artigiano called his write-up, Top Tea cakes, Top Recipe which pithily sums up the experience of most of us this week. There’s a charming description and photo of the dough and it’s with understandable pride that Tony declares: “they were absolutely delicious, the ingredients magically combining to produce a teacake with a depth of flavour which I had never experienced before”.
Jo of Zeb Bakes ran out of time for a full write-up but kindly sent along some photographs and notes of her variations. Jo substituted “crystallised pineapple for the chopped peel and a few sultanas for the fruits and used cocoa butter which worked very well”. I’d been wondering about cocoa butter as the ‘white fat’ so this is particularly helpful information. I like the lump sugar (that’s probably not the correct term) that tops these tea cakes and would probably try and do that on the next bake.
Update: Jo says that these are topped with pearl sugar (Dan Sukker) from Totally Swedish in London.
Good crumb shot (these are particularly useful in the write-ups to which I’ve linked and I’m rather envious of them).
The neighbours to whom we gave (most of) the tea cakes after the photographs actually clapped when they saw them. There’s something about the glossy tops and warm fragrance of tea cakes that causes all and sundry to advise you to open a Tea Shop. Which would be very flattering except that I was the supervising (and occasionally intervening baker) this week, overseeing the household’s baking novice who volunteered to bake this.
A small misunderstanding meant that the dough had 250g of dried fruit and 50g of mixed peel (a shame as we’re not lacking in jars of very chunky marmalade which is the suggested substitute for mixed peel). The tea cakes were baked in the gas oven and Mark 7 (verified by oven thermometer) seems to have been a little too fast for that oven as the dough browned very quickly despite some nimble shelf swapping (as with most yeast preparations, we didn’t want to open the door for the first 10 mins but should probably have the trays on the shelves at the 7 minute mark rather than 10).
I’ve learned a lot from other people’s reported experiences when baking the tea cakes and already have some variations in mind and some experimentation with the oven temperature. I think that I’d also make 15/16 from this recipe rather than 9 as they were enormous albeit our tiny neighbours somehow managed to eat 2 apiece leaving their guests to share the remainder.
I look forward to this week’s challenge for 27 November: Cardamom peanut brittle pg 314 or Sesame ginger halva pg 319. If you blog about your experience with this recipe, please post links in the comments or tweet pictures or links to @foodcraftspace or @evidencematters using the hashtag #shortandtweet - Thank you. It’s the same procedure if you don’t blog but just post a photograph of your work. Please send the links by 8pm 20 November.
Schedule for the #shortandtweet December challenge.
Outline for #shortandtweet challenge and its conditions.
Thank you to everyone for taking part. I look forward to seeing everyone’s sweets, whether the peanut brittle, halva or similar.
