O, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea
And baking‘s a thing that can never go wrong —
And I am Marie of Rumania.
And does this look like a scone to you? Why, no, it does not. Why, you may ask, would one even think that flat-but-lightweight-cookie-looking-thing might be a scone? Because the recipe is awfully close to being the same.
Once upon a time in the Wilds of Childhood, T’s father used to make something he called Tea Cakes. Now, he only made them for Special Occasional or High Holy Days wherein people came over after church, and he needed to Impress Them. (He also used to make his special Parker House Rolls on these occasions as well.) Sadly, he somehow “forgot” the recipe in the intervening years wherein his daughters begged most piteously for these details. (It really is a shame, the loss of memory occurring these days in sixty-four year old men who don’t want to be called on to bake anything.) (Fortunately, the Parker House Roll recipe is in a cookbook and cannot so easily be expunged from memory.) Artful daughter then turned to her friend Google for help. While taking the “advice” of the myriad recipes to be found online would have been easy, T thought she’d first take a stab at reverse engineering the recipe from taste memory. (Yeah, that was going to work. The taste memory is from over twenty years ago…)
The trick about Southern foods – for the Tea Cake is One Of Those Southern Things from T’s father’s childhood – is that many of them were beget by the British. (As was the amusing — solely in retrospect, to be sure — habit T’s father had of saying, “I say!” at the end of his more infuriated repeated requests) In her quest to recreate the airy, sweet cakes, she polluted a scone recipe with a little more moisture than was called for, and more baking powder. The addition of dried cranberries and peel probably didn’t help with the “traditional” taste she was after, but without them the cakes would have seemed quite bland.
The original cakes of T’s childhood were leavened with baking soda, and had that specific bicarbonate bite to them — but they were also plenty sweet. For some reason cream of tartar as an ingredient comes to mind… buttermilk (because isn’t that in every Southern food?), and plenty of butter…
Long story short: these things, though good they are not IT. And so the search continues. Thoughts? Suggestions? Anyone else ever had a Southern Tea Cake? (Mom?)
I’m southern but I lack the heritage. That tea cake looks pretty darn good to me right now though…mmm. Try self-rising flour and I’d add some molasses or maple syrup or some sweetener to the dough. Honey! Honey would be good…