Sweet Bread Buns, by David Petts

The actual recipe is as follows:

Take flower & sugar & nutmeg & cloves & mace & sweet butter & sack & a little ale barm, beat your spice & put in your butter & your sack, cold, then work it well all together & make it in little cakes & so bake them, if you will you may put in some saffron into them or fruit.

It is mostly self-evident, although sack was a dry white wine (similar to sherry) and ale barm is the yeast from brewing beer. We tried to follow it as close as possible, the only differences from the receipt used by Lady Fettiplace was that we had no ale barm, only instant yeast, and we had no nutmeg. For the sack we used some sherry (good splash); the flour was white plain flour, the sugar was white caster sugar.

We based our proportions on a soul cake recipe we found on-line, but because this also contained eggs and the ale barm would have also been liquid(ish), we found our initial mix rather stiff, so we loosened it with a little bit of milk. We ended up with something more like a bread dough rather than a cake batter. We left this in a warm place to rise for about 90 minutes. We decorated them with some currents in the shape of a cross and baked them for about 30 minutes at Gas Mark 5. End result, something that resembled slightly dense hot-cross buns. You could taste the spices, but the sack (sherry) didn’t bring much to the party to be honest. I think we could probably have used a bit more yeast to make them rise a bit better, but otherwise, not bad at all. Now feeling inspired to investigate the Fettiplace book for more North Berkshire Jacobean recipes. Also might give the some of the online recipes for Soul Cakes although I imagine that as these contain egg, that they will be more ‘cakey’ than the sweet bread buns we made today.