Tea Cakes

The other day I was searching for something on the web and came across a recipe for tea cakes. I had not thought of them in years but that recipe immediately brought back memories from my youth.

When we were growing up my sister and I spent a good bit of time down at my maternal grandparents house. Mama worked and every afternoon after school, we would ride the bus down to my grandparents house and stay there until mama got off work and came to pick us up. My grandmother who was a diabetic and nearly blind had fallen several years earlier and had broken her hip and was confined to a wheel chair. That did not stop her from getting around in the large kitchen in their house and she still did some cooking. She always tried to have something for us to eat in the afternoons. I remember eating tomato sandwiches made with whole wheat bread and canned tomatoes, but one of the staples down there was tea cakes. Seemed like they always had some tea cakes on hand. Sometimes they would put chocolate icing on them but most times they were just plain tea cakes.

When I came across that recipe I printed it out. I had most of the ingredients on hand but was running low on butter and lacked the right kind of flour so I could not fix them right then. Since then I have been to the store and got what I was lacking. This afternoon, I mixed up a batch of tea cake batter and cooked a small pan full of them. They were just as good as I remembered them. In the next few days I may try my hand at putting some chocolate icing on a batch.