My boyfriend is part of a British-style Brass Band led by a Welshman. The band director throws a holiday party for the whole ensemble (plus S.O.’s) at some time around Christmas. This year it was on Boxing Day – a distinctly British thing to celebrate. Due to circumstances involving pets, I could not attend. So I decided to send baked goods in my place. Given the holidays and the audience, I figured that Welsh cakes were in order.

I first discovered Welsh cakes – or, as I first saw them called, Welsh cookies – at the New Hampshire Highland Games (NHHG). There was a vendor there known simply as the Welsh Cookie Man. I’d never had a Welsh cookie before attending but everyone I spoke with at the festival or told I was going asked me to get them these Welsh treats. In fact, the Welsh cookie booth was so busy that they often sold out by the second day of the three-day show and did not come back for the last day. It was clearly crucial to get these Welsh cakes as quickly as possible upon arrival.

It was well-founded exuberance that led to such a striking demand. The booth had a couple dozen different flavors of Welsh cakes. Everything from traditional to chocolate pecan to bacon maple. All of them were delicious little treats. From what I was told, you could freeze these Welsh cakes and then eat them throughout the year… but who has the willpower to not eat them right away, really?

What are Welsh Cakes?

A Welsh cake is a mildly sweet, fairly dry griddle cake. They are traditionally made with currants and nutmeg for flavoring and baking powder (or self-raising flour) for leavening. Unlimited variations exist on the flavors for Welsh cakes but the traditional ones are what I wanted to present.

In searching for recipes, I came across several that called them Welsh cakes rather than Welsh cookies. They are the same thing. For purposes of this post, I’m going to call them Welsh cakes as this was the name confirmed when a tin of them was presented at the party to a native Welsh woman.

the Recipe

I’ve thought about Welsh cakes many times since I stopped attending NHHG but never really considered making my own. Until now, that is. So off to the internet I went in search of recipes.

I landed on two different recipes that looked interesting if for no other reason than their variation. One used self-raising flour while the other used AP and added baking powder. One had no seasonings other than salt while the other used a considerable amount of nutmeg for that classic Welsh cake flavor. I figured I’d start with the more basic and see how they turned out before passing judgment.

Recipe Attempt 1

The first one, from Love Foodies, showed no use of nutmeg whatsoever. This recipe called for self-raising flour and no additional chemical leavener. It does not require the dough to be chilled before being rolled out, which is a nice time saver. When I whipped up this batch of Welsh cakes, however, they tasted like slightly sweetened pancakes with raisins in them. Not at all what I wanted. I couldn’t send these Welsh cakes to a Welsh family as a traditional holiday treat. It would have been disrespectful.

Recipe Attempt 2

The second recipe, from Food Network, used plenty of nutmeg, an extra egg, and a combination of all-purpose flour and baking powder. Since I was in a rush, I adapted a bit and took the self-raising flour idea from the other recipe instead. This one came out with flavor much closer to the Welsh Cookie Man’s traditional recipe and did not seem like a raisin pancake. Substantial improvement and something I was willing to share… even if I really wanted to eat them all myself.

The Welsh cake recipe shown here is a mix of the two, plus my twists. This gave the combination of ease and flavor that I wanted. I’ve also increased the ratio of flour to wet ingredients. Both batches of Welsh cakes I made required the addition of a substantial amount of flour to make the dough dry enough to cut. It’s best to do this up front to avoid having the knead it in later and start activating unwanted gluten to yield a chewy Welsh cake.

the Process

the Dry Ingredients

The mix for this is pretty easy, especially when using self-raising flour. If you opt to use all-purpose flour and baking powder instead, use about 1 tsp of baking powder per cup of flour. In the US, self-rising flour (which is actually different from self-raising flour from Britain) also includes a little bit of salt. Since I’m in the US most of the time, I used self-rising flour and went a little scant on the additional salt.

To be honest, I also didn’t read the instructions as thoroughly as I should have before starting. I did not have an orange to hand and so had to omit the orange zest. To substitute, I used 1/4 tsp of the fantastic orange vanilla extract from Mannix Vanilla in with the wet ingredients. It gave just a little sweetness and complexity from the vanilla plus that citrus scent and pop.

In addition to not having one of the flavoring ingredients, I forgot to add the sugar in to the dry ingredients before rubbing in the butter. It didn’t seem to much matter. Adding the sugar at the end of the dry process did just fine.

Rubbing in the butter cubes was honestly pretty easy, even without the sugar in there. It definitely achieves a sandy-looking consistency, especially with the nutmeg making it kinda appear dirty. Be sure to reach your fingers all the way to the bottom of the bowl to mix in the dry ingredients there.

the Wet Ingredients

Quick beat of a couple of eggs and some milk (plus the aforementioned orange vanilla extract) and that’s the wet ingredients done. I imagine that using buttermilk would do a little more for the loft of the finished Welsh cakes but I didn’t have any in the house. I always feel somewhat guilty getting a quart of buttermilk (the smallest quantity available from my local supermarket) when I only need a couple of tablespoons. It makes me bake all the other buttermilk recipes I can to make up for the extra expense. Regular milk seemed to do alright here regardless.

the Mix

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and use a dough whisk to bring it together. Both of the recipes I tried came out with a pretty wet mix based on their ratios. These are meant to be pretty dry. They are also meant to be able to be rolled out without sticking to the pin and cut without sticking to the cutter. To get the consistency I was wanted, I wound up adding a fair bit of extra flour.

the Shape

Flour the counter and roll out the dough to about 1/4″. Not too hard as long as the dough isn’t super-sticky… which mine was. More flour. Lots and lots of flour.

Prior to this holiday season I had not owned any sort of cookie cutters. I’d always done drop cookies or thumbprints or something else particularly forgiving and not requiring decoration. Welsh cakes are most assuredly not a drop cookie though. I needed a cutter. My boyfriend and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond the day before Christmas in search of cookie cutters. Believe it or not, it was tough to find a plain circle one (probably because everyone else got their first). Instead, I settled on a set of biscuit cutters in three sizes: 2″, 3″, and 4″. This conveniently also gives me the option of making biscuits later. Maybe I should have gotten buttermilk after all…

Back to the Welsh cakes for now. Once I dredged seemingly the entire kitchen with flour, the cutter worked and I was able to get clean round disks of dough out. Working the scraps, especially with as many times as I wound up doing so, made the dough more cohesive. I kneaded it too much. This dough should stay a bit crumbly and cold. If there had been more time I would have put the scraps back in the fridge or freezer in between cutting.

the Bake

The bake, if you can call it that, is really a skillet kind of job. Melt butter into the pan and essentially saute the Welsh cakes.

I used a griddle pan on the first attempt. It stayed too hot and the Welsh cakes got pretty dark. The raisins burned a bit. It was also very difficult to get between the Welsh cakes and under them to flip them. Basically, the whole thing was a flop.

On the second go-around, I used a medium ceramic skillet (my go-to egg pan). This worked wonderfully as it did not get too hot and allowed me to flip the Welsh cakes more easily. I worked batches of 9-10 at a time for most of the dough. The last batch was 14 in the pan at once. Even with this many cooking, the Welsh cakes did not stick together due to their being so dry.

I tried two methods for getting granulated sugar to stick to the Welsh cakes after taking them out of the pan. First I used a small dish of sugar and rolled the Welsh cakes in it. A little bit stuck but it took manual intervention (literally, rubbing sugar on to the cookies) to get enough on to make it worthwhile. The second method was to put a wire rack over some wax paper, tip the cookies out on to the wire rack, and then sprinkle sugar over the top with a spoon. This worked better, despite making a mess. I still rubbed some of the sugar on to make sure it stuck well.

the Finished Welsh Cakes

The final product are fairly heavily-spiced Welsh cakes with mild sweetness and a dry, but not crumbly, texture. The raisins are a sweet, moist counterpoint to the cookie itself. There was only the faintest orange flavor in mine on account of using the extract instead of zest. The vanilla part of the extract was overpowered by HOLY NUTMEG, BATMAN!

Most importantly, the recipients of the Welsh cakes appreciated them thoroughly. They even took to social media after the party to publicly message my boyfriend saying that the Welsh cakes are awesome. That’s the best praise I can get from a critical and knowledgeable audience.

my Notes for Next Time

• Use more flour in the dry ingredient mix. Adding it later worked but meant kneading the dough, which messes up the texture of the final Welsh cake. It makes them more dense.
• Add in orange zest or use purely orange extract. The orange got somewhat lost under the nutmeg.
• Reduce the amount of nutmeg. The recipe uses 1 tsp of ground nutmeg, which is actually quite a bit. The result can taste a little bitter or even astringent if you’re not accustomed to heavily spiced foods. Maybe 3/4 tsp instead of a full tsp next time.

Now back to bread…