Twelfth Cake

Name: Twelfth Cake
Yield: Makes one 22 cm/9 inch cake
Ingredients: 400 ml milk; 2 sachets/14 g of dried yeast; 800 g/1 lb 12 oz flour; 140 g/5 oz caster sugar; 510 g/1 lb 2 oz currants; 15 g salt; 115 g/4 oz butter, at room temperature; ¼ tsp each ground cloves, nutmeg, mace; 100 g/4 oz candied peel; 1 tsp ground cinnamon

Preparation info

Makes
one
22 cm 9 inch cake

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

At Christmas We Feast

By Annie Gray

Published 2021

About

John Mollard, 1803, The Art of Cookery¹⁴¹

The first published recipe to be explicitly called Twelfth Cake, this is essentially a yeast-risen fruit cake of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century type, more often called plum cake, rich cake, or great cake in the past. It was being eclipsed by more modern versions with eggs in place of the yeast even by the time it was published. If