A touch of magic goes into woman’s tea cakes
The tea cake is something a bit special. We don’t see or get to taste them that often.
Two reasons may account for this, and both are mentioned by Gloria Shavers of Texarkana, who was at the recent Cullen Baker Fair in Bloomburg selling her tea cakes.
“My tea cake is special because of the magic I put in then,” she said with a twinkle in the eye. “And also because the recipe I use comes from my great-great-grandmother.”
That’s the secret. Make them from whatever you have around the house but be sure to use grandmother’s recipe.
It doesn’t seem to be a cookie or a cake exactly, but something in between. Something from long ago. And if the cake does accompany the English tea or other social occasion, Shavers is continuing that tradition because she says she makes her tea cake to share and “because I want to be sociable.”
“After 31 years working at Red River Army Depot, I retired. But I didn’t just want to stay home. So I started making these and selling them from my home or going to festivals,” she said.
She’s come to the Cullen Baker Fair each year for the past three, she said, and enjoys the small-town atmosphere where “the people are so friendly.”
She calls her vendor business “Gloria’s Specialties” and goes regularly to farmers’ markets such as the Gateway Farmers Market in Texarkana, Ark.
When researching the online history of the tea cake, it is not described with an unusual ingredient or cooking method. The difference is, as what Shavers said, “my magic touch and that of my grandparents.”