1832 Sugar Cakes

I had a follow up appointment with my surgeon, who was happy with my progress.  When I relayed her information to my physiotherapist, and suggested that I should be able to start cooking soon, she actually yelled "NO".   Apparently there is too much risk for contraindicated movements, and overdoing it, creating swelling and delaying recovery.   

Today, though, with help of both the menfolk at home, my son and hubby, I was able to make cookies.   My son set everything up for me, the bowls, mixer, ingredients were all set out neatly and ready to go.  I was able to mix and set the dough in the fridge to set while I took a break.   That was a mistake that I'll mention later - the putting the dough in the fridge, not the break :).   Hubby took over when I rolled and cut the cookies, by actually baking them.

Once again, I'm happy with the results from one of my favourite historic cookbooks, The Cooks Own Book.  I have a digital copy which was published in 1832.  It's a book I would actually like to own in it's original form, because I like it so much.   It's different from other cookery books of that time period, and many others, in that it's more like an encyclopedia, set up in alphabetical order.   It's really easy to find recipes for whatever you're looking for.   As well, it's quite comprehensive in it's recipes, and so far, they've worked properly and been tasty. 

Sugar Cakes

Ingredients : 

1/2 lb butter,     (1 cup butter)

1/2 lb flour,       (2 cups flour)

1/4 lb white sugar,  (1/2 cup sugar)

1 egg yolk     (1 egg yolk)

1 tbsn cream   (1 tbsn cream)

1 tbsn zested orange peel

Modern method:

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add the egg yolk and cream and beat until well blended.   Mix in the flour until ingredients are well combined and make a soft dough.   Sprinkle flour generously on the work surface.  Using half the dough at a time, dust the top of the dough before rolling 1/4 in. thick.  Cut into shapes and set on a parchment paper lined cookie tray.   (because of the butter content, you might not need to butter the cookie pan before baking, if you don't have parchment paper.)

Bake until done -   1 1/2 in rounds took 10-12 minutes, yield 5 dozen cookies of this size.  

The original instructions call for mixing the flour and sugar together and rubbing in the butter.   Then beating the egg yolk and cream together, before adding it to the flour/butter mixture.   This would work quite fine.  Due to being on crutches, and not able to spend a long time standing yet, I used a hand mixer and beat the butter and sugar together, before mixing in the egg and cream.   Once it was well blended, I gave it a quite taste because this recipe has about half the sugar many other similar shortbread type cooking recipes have.   It definitely was not sweet, and was a bit bland.  That could be because I didn't wash the butter in rose water.   Instead of adding more sugar, I zested the peel of an orange and added it.   This really boosted the flavour and not out of the realm of 1832 possibilities.

The dough was really soft.  I was worried it was too soft to roll, so I set it in the fridge while I rested my
hip.   This was a mistake because with the amount of butter in this recipe, the dough just hardened up completely and wouldn't roll out.  It just cracked.  I had to warm it up again before I could roll it out.

Using a generous amount of flour, I rolled the dough to 1/4 in thick and used a metal cutter to make cookies about 1 1/2 inch in diameter.  The first batch went in for 8 minutes, which wasn't long enough.  We added 4 minutes and it was fine.  The edges on some of the thinner cookies are a little brown.   Next time roll a tad more evenly or cook for 10 minutes.  My excuse is that I had to do this sitting down, and it was harder to judge the correct thickness.

They are really good.  Not overly sweet and a very nice flavour and texture.  By changing up the method, they have more of a sugar cookie texture to them, whereas I think the original method would be more like a traditional shortbread.  Still, they were really easy to make, fast and tasty.

Since we're pretty much snowed in again today, with crazy blustery winds, snow covered roads, snow and blowing snow, it's nice to have an extra snack.