If the South is known for one thing, it’s our cooking, and the tea cake is one of our signature items.
To some families, the sweet, biscuit-like cookies represent childhood, and just one bite sends you soaring back to a warm kitchen fragrant with the smell of fresh homemade cookies and treats.
“Growing up, the tea cake was like our Oreo or chocolate chip cookie,” said Maggie Robinson of Greenwood. “I have fond memories of watching my mom make them.”
As their mother, Floy Horton, placed the cookies in the oven Robinson and her 10 brothers and sisters would sit around the table and nibble on the leftover dough.
“The raw dough tasted so good. We waited to see who was going to get to lick the spoon,” she said.
Robinson still remembers the smell of vanilla and nutmeg filling the kitchen as she and her brothers and sisters anxiously waited for the sweet morsels to come out of the oven.
“The smell of the baking cookies was magical,” she said. “That was my favorite thing. And after the cookies were finished, we could taste the love and care that was put into making them.”
Robinson’s mother also made homemade chocolate in an iron skillet to go with the cookies. “The cookies themselves weren’t that sweet, so we’d stack two together with the chocolate in the middle and eat them that way,” Robinson said. “My mother didn’t keep them in a cookie jar; she would put them in a large yellow mixing bowl under a sliver cake cover top.”
Robinson’s mother had an original tea cake recipe, and Robinson regrets never obtaining it. But she does, however, have her own version of the tea cake.
“My husband, who also grew up with tea cakes, ran into an older lady who made and sold them,” she said. “We asked her for the recipe, and she gave it to us.”
Carrie Jenkins, a retired cook for Stone Street School, had been making the tea cakes for years.
“They tasted similar to my mom’s, but I added more nutmeg to bring out the taste,” Robinson said “I remember really tasting the nutmeg in my mom’s cookies.”
It took her five tries to finally get the recipe exactly how she wanted it. “I doubled Ms. Jenkins’ original recipe and modified a few more things,” Robinson said.
Though Robinson hasn’t tackled the homemade chocolate yet, she says she may attempt it in the future.
“Making homemade chocolate is tough, but I may try it sometime. I’m not really sure yet,” she said with a laugh.
“My husband and daughter love the tea cakes,” Robinson said. “I usually make them around the holidays, but they’ll eat them year-round.” Her husband, Freddie, enjoys the cookies with tea, while her daughter, Fredericka, likes them warm and fresh out of the oven.
Robinson said the secret to great tea cakes is to let the dough sit in the refrigerator overnight. “My mom used to let the dough sit in the refrigerator overnight. It allows the ingredients to mix together well, and the dough is more manageable,” she said.
She also recommends using a mixer with dough hooks to mix the ingredients together and form the dough. “Mixing it by hand is tough because the dough is pretty stiff,” she said. “My mom would mix it all by hand. I’m not sure how she managed!”
To keep from burning the bottoms of the cookies, Robinson places them on the middle oven rack for five minutes before moving them to the top rack. “It’s best to cut thick cookies out of the dough so that they’ll be soft when baked. If you make them too thin, the cookies will be crunchy,” Robinson said.
But if the cookies come out a little hard, Robinson said microwaving them for five seconds will soften them up some.
Robinson enjoys making her special tea cakes, and she hopes to pass along the recipe and the love for baking the treats to Fredericka one day.
“She helps me make them. She’s usually the one who cuts them out when we make them. This is something special that she and I enjoy doing together,” Robinson said.
nContact Beth Thomas at 581-7233 or bthomas@gwcommonwealth.com.
