SC - Fine Cakes?

[Jessica Tiffin]

Greetings, the list.

Several weeks back, someone posted the original recipe for Fine Cakes from
John Partridge [The widowes Treasure], as reproduced  in Lorna J. Sass's "To
the Queen's Taste" (I've appended it below); they also posted a discussion
of their experience redacting this recipe.  In a moment of mental abberation
I failed to save this discussion.  Could someone possibly re-post it or send
it to me privately?  I experimented with this recipe this weekend, and would
very much like to compare the proportions I used with someone else's version.  

>To make fine cakes  Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it
>in an earthen pot.  Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it
>as long as you would a pasty of Venison, and when it baked it will be
>full of clods.  Then searce your flower through a fine sercer.  Then
>take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take
>sugar, cloves, mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme
>to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper
>all together.  Then put thereto your flower.  So make your cakes. 
>The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little.  Lay
>paper under them. 

( I used a basic shortbread guideline - flour: sugar: fat at 3:1:2, which
worked very nicely with the butter (light, crumbly spicy shortbread), and
not so well with the cream (too dense and tough).  The pre-baked flour gives
a wonderful, slightly nutty flavour.  I suspect the cream problem was
partially the fact that the electricity went out for half an hour half way
through that batch, and they cooked too slowly.  A great pity, since the
recipe suggests the cream version is better, and my experience was exactly
the opposite.)

any comments very welcome,
Melisant

Melisant de Huguenin * Jessica Tiffin * melisant at iafrica.com *
users.iafrica.com/m/me/melisant
Seneschal, Shire of Adamastor, Drachenwald (Cape Town, South Africa)
Sable, three owls rising argent, each maintaining a willow slip vert.

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