These tea cakes are a classic Southern teatime treat, with cakey centers and crunchy edges. They’re simplicity on a plate, with no fancy ingredients, and they store well for a relatively long time. They look like cookies but are called cakes; no matter what you call them, they’re delicious, and they’re easy to make on short notice. Bake a double batch and freeze some for later, so you can have them ready for guests on short notice.
Ingredients for Tea Cakes
- Butter: Creaming butter and sugar incorporates air and makes the dough produce lighter cakes. Take the butter out of the fridge about an hour before you start making these cookies so it can be fully softened.
- Sugar: Use white sugar, not brown.
- Large eggs: The eggs bind all the ingredients in this tea cakes recipe. It’s best to use room-temperature eggs when baking.
- Vanilla extract: This will flavor the cakes.
- Flour: These tea cakes will spread somewhat, but you still want them to have enough structure so you can pick each up without it bending. All-purpose flour has enough protein and gluten to give the cookies some strength.
- Baking powder: This helps the cakes rise; do not use plain baking soda as a substitute.
Directions
Step 1: Make the creamed mixture
Preheat the oven to 375°F. In a large bowl, cream the softened butter and sugar until light and fluffy, five to seven minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract.
Step 2: Combine the dry ingredients
In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt, then gradually add this dry mixture to the wet mixture. You’ll end up with a very soft dough.
Step 3: Bake the tea cakes
Drop the dough by tablespoonfuls onto the greased baking sheets, 2 inches apart. Bake until the edges turn golden-brown, seven to eight minutes. Move the cakes from the baking sheets to a wire rack to cool.
Tea Cake Variations
- Top them with nuts or cinnamon: Two potential variations are to add a few chopped nuts or a sprinkling of cinnamon to the tops of the spoonfuls of dough before baking. These aren’t traditional ingredients, but they can be tasty additions.
- Frost them: Use the meringue frosting from these pastel tea cookies to color each cake. You can stick with pastels or use whatever color you want to whip up.
- Flavor them: Add a little almond extract or lemon extract to the dough, instead of vanilla, to give the tea cakes a boost in flavor.
How to Store Tea Cakes
After you whip up this tea cookies recipe, store the tea cakes in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a week.
Can you freeze tea cakes?
Like other cookies and cakes, tea cakes freeze well. Wrap each in freezer-safe plastic wrap and then seal the packets in a freezer bag or freezer-safe container. The container is preferable if you’re worried about the cakes being bent or crushed. Eat them within three months. They may still be good after that, but keep an eye on them for signs of freezer burn.
Tea Cake Tips
What’s the difference between these tea cakes and tea cookies?
These tea cakes look like cookies, right? But they’re more like a combination. In the South, the “tea cake” looks like a cookie with a crispy edge and soft center that’s almost like a small cake in texture. Outside the South, the term takes on many more meanings. Someone who makes tea cakes could be making Southern-style tea cakes, tea cakes that look like mini muffins with flat tops or even an actual cake that they plan to slice and serve with tea. There are English tea cakes, Russian tea cakes covered in confectioners’ sugar, even tea biscuits, such as these lemon tea biscuits that look like Southern biscuits and are meant to be served with tea. Someone from another part of the country may call tea cakes “tea cookies” instead.
Do you need to use soft red winter wheat flour?
No, you don’t need to find any specialty flours for this recipe. If you’ve done any “Southern-style” baking before, especially of biscuits, you may have heard that Southern soft red winter wheat flour is better for making any baked goods, compared with the conventional all-purpose flour that’s available across the country. Supposedly the lower protein amount in the flour makes baked goods lighter and fluffier. Turns out that may not actually be the case, but whatever your preference, you can use the plain all-purpose flours that are available all over the country. If you’re actually in the South and normally use the soft red winter wheat flour anyway, you can use that as well.
How do you make uniform cakes?
Grab a 1-tablespoon cookie scoop to produce evenly sized balls of dough and uniformly sized tea cakes. After scooping up dough, press the dough down in the scoop to ensure the cavity is filled and to smooth out what will be the base of the cake. Remove excess dough and position the dough on the baking sheet.
