[Sca-cooks] Hauviette's Fine Cakes

[Kathleen Madsen]

I organised providing food for a friends vigil this
past weekend at the West Kingdom's Purgatorio
coronation.  One dish was overwhelmingly popular -
Hauviette's Fine Cakes, a recipe I found in the
Florilegium and had actually thought of keeping to
myself as they are so yummy.  One lady said they are
the closest thing she's been able to find to
Pfeffernusse.  The only change I made was to keep the
cookies as a ball shape, my dough was a bit too dry
and crumbly to hold together to flatten.

This is going in the recipe box as a keeper!

Eibhlin

Recipe below from Hauviette's original posting:

Fine Cakes
 

I wanted to reproduce a recipe that emulated Chaucers
�cookie�  and frequent

mentions of �cakes�, however there are
no recipes that originate from the

period of Chaucers tales to work from. As such, I
turned to a later period

source for a recipe which I have reproduced below.

 

To make fine cakes

John Partridge [The widowes Treasure] in Lorna J.
Sass's "To the Queen's

Taste, compliments of Master Bear.

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.

 

This recipe and it�s development must be
credited to three individuals who

are members of the SCA. First is Master Bear,
who�s expertise as a

professional baker is invaluable and he has laid out
the basic ground work

for the recipe and also explains it�s rational.
Secondly, is Dame Aoife who

is a consumate SCA cook whose experience with dairy
seems unmatched in my

opinion. Finally , there is Lord Bogdan who is also an
excellent SCA cook who

constantly looks for challenges to his knowledge and
skill. It is essentially

his recipe that I am working from. I do not pretend to
have developed this

recipe on my own although the thorough instructions of
the original leave

little to be confused.  I have chosen to use butter
instead of clotted cream

as I see my Taverness having access to sweet butter
and I wished to keep the

recipe simplified.

 

Hauviette�s Fine Cakes Recipe

3 cups roasted, sifted  flour (roast 45 minutes in a
350 degree oven)

1 cup sweet butter (1/2 lb)

2 cups granulated sugar

2 egg yolks

1 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground  mace

 

Cream butter and sugar. Add spices and egg yolks,
blend. Add flour 1/2 cup at

a time.

Scoop dough in a 1 tsp size spoon and pop out onto
parchment paper. Using a

small glass or rolling pin, press the balls of dough
into a small cookie.

Bake at 350 degrees 15 minutes.

Makes about 80