Daniel requested cookies for this month’s Dinner at 1800. Really, he just didn’t want another food that he had to stop himself from spitting out…and I’ll admit the last two months were pretty bad, so I took pity on him. They weren’t exactly cookies, but how could I pass up something called Soda Cakes? Plus the recipe was like two sentences WITH MEASUREMENTS, and I don’t mind admitting I am tired these days. Welcome to month 8 of pregnancy! Oh, and don’t forget to check out the short Instagram version of this recipe.
Soda Cakes
The Virginia Housewife
1824
Step One: Dissolve milk and soda (which I assumed was baking soda) in milk. So far, so good! Then pour it over the flour. It didn’t mention mixing it, so I didn’t.
Step Two: Melt butter and “knead all together until light”. Well, I can’t really say that I was able to knead it in the original sense, considering there was more liquid than flour…but it made a nice thick batter! I also didn’t know exactly what it meant when it said until light…because how can all these heavy ingredients become light?…so I just mixed it together until it was well combined.
Step Three: Put it in shallow “moulds”. This was my first real hesitation. On my first read through this recipe, I thought it said mounds, so I was going to just scoop it out, but when I realized it said molds…I admit I googled it to see what type of molds they might have been talking about, at which point I remembered that it wasn’t unusual to bake cakes in pretty molds in the 19th century…which didn’t really help me since I have none of those. So I experimented with baking them in two different pans – a cookie/brownie combo pan I’ve actually never used before and my Madeleines pans. For the record, when she said shallow molds, she knew what she was talking about. The madeleine cakes definitely baked better.
Step Four: “Bake it quickly in a brisk oven.” I was pretty nervous about this after my failure to correctly interpret the molasses gingerbread temperature…and my super quick research online was less than helpful since most older recipes used terms like “quick” oven rather than brisk. But I decided they were basically the same and went with 400 degrees. And those cakes did bake quickly! So let’s see what my husband thinks!
Verdict:
Daniel was stunned to find that they actually tasted good! It was kind of like a dense, sweet biscuit. Fresh out of the oven, it also reminded me of a thick scone. Were I to do it again (not pregnant), I would try beating it longer – probably in an electric mixer – because I’m betting they wouldn’t be quite as dense. I also would be a little more careful about shaping it in the pans to make them prettier!
Have you ever used a cake mold?
Forest Idylls 