Did you know that Queen Victoria celebrated Twelfth Night, also known as Epiphany, with a large Twelfth Night Cake?
The tradition of the cake had been going on for centuries and originally the cake had been a fruit bread that resembled brioche and held another tradition of its own. A bean would be placed inside the mix and the person that found it would be crowned ’King of the bean’, a title which meant they were responsible for organising the entertainment for the final feast. This altered slightly at the Court of King Henry VIII as the bean was the replaced with a pea. From then, the lucky winner would be declared ‘Queen of the pea’.
By the time Victoria had ascended the throne, baking techniques had advanced. The Twelfth Night Cake no longer contained yeast and the cake was now much more risen and lighter in texture. The placement of a bean/pea continued but Queen Victoria had it replaced with silver trinkets, such as fimbles, charms and coins. Over time, the placement of silver gifts migrated into the Christmas pudding in the form of a silver sixpence (or a penny).
The cake itself would have been heavily decorated with sugar and almond paste. In 1849, the Illustrated London News described the Queens Twelfth Night Cake as ‘about 30 inches in diameter, and tall in proportion: round the side the decoration consisted of stripes of gilded paper, bowing outwards near the top, issuing from an elegant gold bordering’. According to the article, the top of the cake was decorated with sixteen figures, who’s ’characteristic attitudes were clearly given’. The group consisted of ‘beaux and belles of the last century’, dancing children, servants, a violinist and a harpist.
Unfortunately for the Twelfth Night Cake, and the rest of the Twelfth Night celebrations, Christmas gradually became a much more Germanic and they eventually moved to the 25th December, rather than the 5th day of January (although usually celebrated on the 6th in Britain).
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