[Sca-cooks] RE digby fine cakes

[Susan Laing]

 Just to let everyone know - I ended up doubling the ingredients of the
recipe (substituting more cream for the sack as I had none to hand).

I ended up with about 60-70 3inch wide star shaped cookies (we were running
with a celestrial theme and stars ended up easier to cut out with a cookie
cutter than crabs were [birthday baroness' star sign is cancer]

So I would hazard that one quantity of the recipe posted in Cariadoc's
miscellany of "Digby's fine cakes" would make up about 30 or so normal sized
biscuits; and Digby's original recipe (3 times the amount used by Cariadoc)
to make about 90 to 100.

Oh! and the biscuits were NUMMY! :-)

Marion de Paxford

> Unfortunately, it seems that neither Cariadoc nor Digby has included a
> statement of yield for the recipe (a common situation). For various
> more or less intuitive reasons I'm tempted to figure Digby's uncut
> original recipe (which yields just under ten pounds of dough) makes a
> hundred hand-sized cakes, but I really have no hard evidence for it.
>
> I thought to check various other, more modern recipe sources, for
> somewhat similar small cakes, ranging from oatmeal raisin and chocolate
> chip cookies (although now I suspect drop cookies wouldn't provide a
> good analogy, being moister than Digby's cakes -- I think) to more
> industrial recipes for various tea cakes, which come closer but also
> don't give any yield other than gross dough weight.
>
> Of course, you might try the recipe in the Miscellany and see how many
> cakes it actually produces, of the size you want, allowing for
> shrinkage or expansion in the oven, and then make a second batch based
> on that yield.
>
> Adamantius