How to Bake a Twelfth-cake for a Dickens of a Christmas

At long last, here is my twelfth-cake. It's probably not far from Dicken's imaginary cake that he teases as being way too small in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (see my post about Dickens and twelfth-cakes), because, at only 10 inches across, it's about one-quarter the size of a respectable Victorian cake.

If the giant Victorian cake seems excessive, remember two things: first, it's meant to keep for as much as a year, so the festive celebratory cake could still have been turning up for teatime the following September. Second, in some big households like that of the Dickenses, I have no doubt that the servants would have been given shares to send home to their families. So it's all good.

I went with the recipe from William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle, which dates from the 1820s and uses eggs as a leavening agent. After doing some arithmatic to quarter the batch, I decided to use as a guide the proportions for an exactly similar cake in Helen Edden’s Country Recipes of Old England (Country Life, 1929). However, I added back the spices, which she omits (her recipe only calls for nutmeg). I was curious about the coriander, and it adds a subtle lemony quality to the scent of the finished cake. ( I was most pleased to get to use some of the coriander I grew in my garden this year.)

There's not very much brandy in the recipe, and I find it does what vanillla does in more recent cake recipes: the alcohol carries the aromatic essence of the spices, making their bouquet much more subtle and delicate. I used cubes of citrus peel because I didn't have time to find anything else, but I'd love to make this cake with homemade strips of peel.

In the end, this is a relatively simple cake recipe that produces a light, delicious whitish cake chock-full of currants. In Victorian times, though, producing a cake four times this size would not only have been expensive, but would have required prodigious muscle, since it calls for beating large quantities of butter and eggs by hand for 20 minutes or more.

Ingredients

• 1¾ cups sugar
• ½ lb butter
• ½ tsp each of grated nutmeg and allspice
• ¼ tsp each of cinnamon, mace, ground ginger and coriander
• 4 eggs
• ¼ cup brandy
• 1½ cups flour
• 1 lb currants (Because the Victorian cookbooks mention rinsing the currants, I soaked mine in a couple of changes of water, until the water ran clear. They plumped up a bit; this will probably add moisture to the cake.)
• 2 oz blanched almonds, sliced thin
• 3 oz mixed candied peel
• ¼ cup milk

Instructions

1. Before you start, allow all ingredients to come to room temperature.
2. Preheat oven to 300.
3. Grease and flour a 10-inch springform pan.
4. Cream the butter, sugar and spices together until they are very light and fluffy.
5. Beat in the eggs one at a time. You almost can't overbeat them; lots of air in the batter is a good thing.
6. Stir in the brandy, and then lightly sift in and combine the flour.
7. Add the fruit and nuts and combine well, then pour into the pan (adding a dried pea and a bean halfway, if you want to follow the old tradition of choosing a Twelfth Night king and queen).
8. Smooth out the top, using your hand dipped in a little milk.
9. Bake for 2 hours and 45 minutes, or until a toothpick poked into the top comes out clean. (Check a couple of times in the last hour of baking; if the top seems to be browning too fast, place a layer of parchment paper or tinfoil over the top.)
10. Cool on a rack before removing from the pan.

If you are not going to ice it immediately, wrap the cake tightly when it is still barely warm to keep it from going stale. (By the way; mine isn't that dark; it's just that my camera is ill. Imagine the photos were taken by firelight.) It would be delicious plain, or with a very light dusting of icing sugar sifted over the top. If you want to go for Victorian-style decoration, you can ice it with fondant or royal glaze. If you use royal glaze, spread a thin crumb coat on first, allow it to dry, and then add a second layer. As an alternative, you could spread a layer of almond jam over the cake, then cover it over with marzipan, then ice it with buttercream or royal glaze.

To save time (because this project has become a crazy labour of love), I simply covered my cake with store-bought fondant and cut-out holly and oak leaves made from store-bought gumpaste. In honour of the pitiful twelfth-cake described in Edwin Drood, I did take the time to sculpt a Victorian Harlequin based on images from stage shows of the period. It's my first effort with gumpaste and I'm feeling rather good about it. I am still resisting the urge to buy a dremel to add some really fine detail and smooth out the rough patches. Also, he has a Columbine friend, but she's not finished and I think she needs a cake of her own.

If you want to know the full story of twelfth-cake, read on:

• What the Dickens is a Twelfth-Cake?
• Charles Dickens and the Victorian Twelfth-Cake
• Recipe for a Dickensian Twelfth-Cake

And don't forget to click the Linky links below to read more chapters of A Dickens of A Christmas, which will tell you all you need to know about the Christmas goose, Victorian millinery, Dickensian knitting, hot toddies, plum puddings, gin punch... in short, as much Christmas cheer as the good old day ever inspired, in Dickens' time or our own. And while I'm at it, let me just add, "God bless us, every one!"