Jane Austen and Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night is January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, and the official end of Christmas and was often celebrated with games, charades, punch and of course, the Twelfth Night Cake.
During Jane Austen’s life time, the celebration of Twelfth Night was at the height its of popularity. The day and night of the 6th was a time for masks and play acting.
The cake was part of this day rather than the now traditional Christmas evening. Twelfth day cakes were light and covered with coloured sugar, and they contained a bean and a pea. In France this is still a current tradition with a porcelain fève or bean being used instead for the fête des rois. The idea is that the man who found the bean would become king for the night, and the woman who found the pea would become queen. There are variants of this wherein the king and queen could choose a partner for the evening, which could provide an interesting opportunity for romance!
These cakes were quite difficult to make and were often purchased from a local confectioners. In Bath, decorated cakes with Plaster of Paris figures and crowns were displayed in confectioners' shop windows which were illuminated by small oil lamps. In the winter evenings people would go from shop to shop admiring the displays.
Then as now, the end of Twelfth Night dictated that all the decorations should be taken down and the greenery burned or ones house risked bad luck for the rest of the year.
Why not create your own Twelfth day cake and display it on our fantastic blue rose cake stand?
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Culture/LiturgicalYear/recipes
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Today is Epiphany, Twelfth Night – the final feast of the Christmas season before all of the Christmas decorations are taken down on January 6th– which is actually called Twelfth day.
In fact, if you have any more room, you can stuff in a bit of Twelfth Cake – which contained a coin or silver trinket or for the less well off, a pea. Whoever found it could be lord of the manor for the night These often elegantly decorated cakes were an important element in the celebrations for the feast of the Epiphany.

Like most of our Christmas traditions, it’s all a bit of a mish-mash. It seems likely that the present day Christmas cake has its origins in the Twelfth Cake and now the coins and trinkets are more likely to be hidden in the Christmas Pud.
So just one more slice of cake and then it really is all over…
And for those who like recreating the traditional, here’s the earliest printed recipe (1803) for Twelfth Cake by John Mollard, the Jamie Oliver of his day, from his best-seller “The Art of Cookery”.
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