These are the kind I'm familiar with.
Thanks
Doc Creed
Here is another version but this one is not as much like a cookie, as it is baked in little paper cups:
I enjoy your column very much. My family has enjoyed many of your recipes. I hope you can find one for me. My children like the old-fashioned tea cakes. However, their favorite is the recipe that a lady baked and called Tennessee Tea Cakes. She has retired and her children closed the business. It is the only tea cake that I have found that is baked in a small cupcake paper and is not just a cookie. It has a certain flavor that I can’t replicate. It may be brown sugar. I have tried to find a recipe like it, but have had no success.
A: The lady who made Tennessee T-Cakes was the late Frances Ann Barkley of Nashville, who died of lung cancer in 2011. Barkley started the business in her kitchen using a hundred-year-old family recipe. After Oprah Winfrey featured them as one of her favorite things in 2006, the Tennessee Tea Cake became an international sensation, churning out 90,000 cakes a week in flavors as diverse as key lime and chocolate truffle. Alas, the company closed when Barkley died, and her daughters vowed the recipe would stay a family secret. But you can get some hints watching a video of Barkley on YouTube (
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae9BXY5rcSk), shot in 2010 by Tennessee Crossroads TV.
Barkley says the T-Cake is “not a cake or a candy or a cookie” but a “confection” and she says the ingredients are “flour, butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla.”
There are many recipes for Southern tea cakes, which tend to be cookies, and there are those who make them with buttermilk, and some who insist you add nutmeg, but I created the recipe here using just the simple ingredients Barkley mentioned and leaning on my favorite blondie recipe.
These cakes turn out chewy and crisp on the outside with a softer inside. I made them in regular cupcake pans.
Tennessee tea cakes
1 stick butter
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tbsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 tsp. salt
Confectioners’ sugar
Measure butter and sugars into a heavy saucepan and set over medium heat. As the butter melts, whisk in the sugars. Cook, whisking constantly, until sugar is completely dissolved; do not allow to burn. Remove from heat and let cool about 10 minutes.
Beat in eggs and vanilla. Blend in the flour and salt until just combined. Do not overbeat. Line tin with cupcake liners. Spoon in the batter to fill cups by about ¾.
Bake in a 350-degree oven for about 15 to 18 minutes; the cakes should be like brownies, glossy and crisped on outer edges but not completely dry in the center. While still warm, sift confectioners’ sugar on top. Makes 10 to 12, depending upon size.
Both versions look really good!
king family fan - sorry to hijack or derail this thread
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Per serving: 218 calories (35 percent from fat), 8.6 g fat (5.1 g saturated, 2.3 g monounsaturated), 51 mg cholesterol, 2.7 g protein, 33 g carbohydrates, .4 g