Ignore the jar of sprinkles, they don’t feature in this recipe, they just decided to photo bomb the pic!
Inspiration: When my Husband’s co-workers request treats, nine times out of ten, they ask for either a spice based bake or one featuring lemons. On this occasion, a pair of people with spring birthdays wished for bite-sized bits of cake featuring warm autumn spices.
A request I happily accommodated! Until I discovered the sleeve of the cake pan, I’d intended to use sprouted legs and went walk about. Leaving me to wonder at what temp and how long to bake the batter-filled tin. Happily, I located a similar pan on the manufacturer’s website, and even better, I stumbled upon this recipe there as well!
And the crowd went wild for these super moist and flavorful cakes!
A Word of Warning from me to you: First, when and if you assemble these ingredients, the batter they produce is extremely thin — in my cake baking experiences, at least. But never fear! This is precisely how it’s supposed to turn out!
Second, don’t fill the tiny cake molds more than 2/3 to 3/4 full. Otherwise, you’ll encounter difficulties prying them out of the pan and wasting a bunch of the batter as you’ll need to cut the bottoms off the aforementioned tea cakes.
Third, for reasons I don’t quite understand, in the comments section of this recipe for Molasses Tea Cakes, people wrote about finding their taste too molasses-y. So much so that many warned against using blackstrap molasses. Which is interesting, as I thought they needed more molasses and spice!
To each is own.
Admittedly, they aren’t the sweetest tea cake I’ve ever eaten. However, I find this a feature, not a disadvantage. Especially if you’re bringing them to a buffet where dessert offerings tend to lean towards the sugary sweet end of the spectrum. They are by no means savory, but the cakes’ only source of sugar is a quarter cup of molasses. Nor does the recipe call for a glaze.
Just so you know!
Christie’s Canon of Characters: These treats are petite enough to appeal to Poirot if decorated stylishly. Whilst their lack of sugar might appeal to Tuppence. Thus allowing Tuppence to keep a room full of kids celebrating Autumn, Halloween, or a winter holiday from skating on Saturn’s rings during a sugar high! And finally, I think Miss Marple, would enjoy sharing these tiny cakes with visiting inspectors, friends, and the occasional suspect during tea time.
Upon encountering this solution for the first time in the Miss Marple short story, The Tuesday Night Club, I was left baffled. Why? Because up until that moment, I’d never encountered hundred-and-thousands before.
Or so I thought.
Turns out I knew exactly what they were only by a different name: Sprinkles.
Since that day, I’ve learned these tiny confections are much like Shakespearian roses — tasting just as sweet whether they are called hundreds-and-thousands, jimmies, jazzies, vermicelli, nonpareils, pearls, shots, or snowies. Though there are minor variations amongst them, to my mind, they all fall under the broad umbrella of sprinkles.
Okay, fine.
Satisfied with finding the answer to my question, I moved on to the next Miss Marple mystery. Yet, upon subsequent reads, beyond making me giggle at my younger self, something about “He doctored the hundreds and thousands…” still nagged me. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on until I started baking cookies every Thursday to share with Seattle Mystery Bookshop patrons on Fridays.
How did this nefarious fictional husband manage to “doctor” those hundreds-and-thousands?
At first, I theorized he shook them in a jar with the poisonous powder. The only problem? The baddie intended to do away with his wife straightaway, and I’m not so sure this dusting would impart enough arsenic to achieve his hideous objective. (Nor is this something I am going to fiddle around with to find out. There’s a limit to my dedication to this blog.)
Moreover, simply tossing the sprinkles around in an arsenic based powder (like so much lettuce in dressing) would leave behind a visual clue. Which could be mistaken for some sort of spoilage. Leading the victim to leave her desert uneaten and her husband’s wicked plan unfulfilled.
Neither could this villain simply soak the sprinkles in an arsenic solution to impart the element’s death-dealing properties. As sprinkles, being composed primarily of sugar, would melt. Knowledge my much shorter self acquired by watching a generous measure of nonpareils melt into my ice cream nearly every Saturday evening at my grandparents’ house.
So, how did the murderer do it?
Since I’ve never lived in a world where sprinkles, snowies, hundreds-and-thousands, jimmies, jazzies, and nonpareils haven’t been available on grocery store shelves in tubs, tubes, and cartons. It took me far longer than it should’ve to arrive at a solution.
Or, at least, an answer that makes sense to me.
Then, a few months back, during a commercial break in The Great Canadian Baking Show, several of the former popular/winning contestants popped back onto the screen, extolling the virtues of a particular food product by demonstrating its versatility. Witnessing one of the former bakers piping tidy rows of raw sprinkles onto baking sheets caused my little grey cells to sit up and sing.
This was how the foul spouse “…doctored the hundreds and thousands…”
He made his own.
Theory firmly lodged amongst the folds of my brain, I did a bit of sleuthing to see if this idea was even remotely possible. Whereupon I learned the machine-made sprinkles I love to put on anything, and everything are just over one hundred years old.
Newspaper adverts from 1921-1923 for sprinkles.
According to Wikipedia and corroborated by advertisements I located, chocolate sprinkles started becoming commercially available across the U.S. around 1921. Seven years after, a pair of Dutch candy companies pioneered a similar product. Which, unlike many of their American counterparts, actually contained real chocolate. (Though how fast these manufactured petite sweets traveled across the English Channel and into the UK, I don’t know.)
Although this technological advent is fairly new (in geologic terms), homemade sprinkles date back several centuries. Apparently, there’s several French pastry recipe going back to the seventeenth century which gives bakers the option of topping their treats with nonpareils or sanding sugar. Even more exciting, thanks to Michigan State University’s Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project, there’s an indexable cookbook with a recipe for nonpareils dating back to 1864!
This quick and dirty timeline, when paired with the fact that Agatha Christie published The Tuesday Night Club in 1927, shows us that Agatha Christie, Miss Marple, and the killer all inhabited a world before mass-produced sprinkles stepped into the limelight. More importantly, the knowledge of how to make snowies at home hadn’t been shunted off to the periphery of baking — yet. (Where these recipes lingered for nearly a century until Covid lockdowns gave people time to explore the margins of baking again.)
A modern take of a traditional trifle. The photo’s from Unsplash.
Okay, fine, he made his own sprinkles.
But how did this villain ensure his unsuspecting wife would eat a lethal amount of arsenic via these crunchy bits of formed sugar? Mind you, this is only an educated guess, but I suspect he substituted rat poison for a portion of the powdered sugar and swapped the clean water for some he’d adulterated with flypaper. Then, he instructed his accomplice to use a heavy hand when applying the poisoned pearls to the top of the trifle.
(Please, don’t do this.)
A Rough on Rats advert which gives instructions on how to kill rats that, sadly, work equally well on humans.
Remember, this murder took place in 1926-1927 when manufacturers of rodenticides and insecticides happily embraced arsenic as their active ingredient. Despite the colorants producers added to their products, endeavoring to dissuade people from administering rat poison to their nearest and dearest, this fail-safe often fell short. In this fictional instance, so long as this diabolical husband stuck to making chocolate sprinkles, this “safety feature” was easily circumvented.
Above and beyond ensuring his wife’s untimely death, this murder-minded spouse accomplished several other feats by making his own hundreds-and-thousands. Recall that aforementioned accomplice? The effort this man took to “doctor” these sprinkles, more than likely, allowed him to manipulate his desperate (according to the text) younger lover/accomplice into carrying his heinous plan over the finish line.
In a — I did my part, now it’s your turn — kind of scenario.
Though I wonder: Did his female accomplice realize he was setting her up to take the fall? Because I bet dollars to doughnuts, this crooked husband could prove he never set foot in the kitchen the day that terrible trifle was served (and probably most others). Why would he? He had both a wife and a maid to take care of the canning, candy-making, and meals for him.
Next, by partaking of the tainted treat with his wife, he misdirected attention away from the nefariously designed arsenic ladened sprinkles and himself. A calculated risk that bought him a breath of deniability should his wife’s murder and its method come to light:
OMG, if I hadn’t scraped those hundreds-and-thousands of my portion, I would’ve followed my wife to the grave!/ I don’t care for their texture./ They were contaminated with arsenic, you say? How can that be? My wife always bought XYZ brand. Oh no! Has someone else died?/ They were handmade? You don’t say./ She said what?She‘s crazy! I never did anything to encourage her affections. I was a happily married man./She says I made those hundred-and-thousands? How? I can’t even boil water!
And so on and so forth. Until…
It wasn’t I who sprinkled the hundreds-and-thousands on that damned trifle.
At least that’s how I imagine the murderer might have used the era’s everyday sexism as a smokescreen, why I believe he made chocolate sprinkles to complete his evil deed, and the method he used to “doctor” the hundreds and thousands in this classic Miss Marple mystery.
TO BE CLEAR: I’m not advocating weaponizing sprinkles. Murder is illegal, immoral, unethical, and frankly, a d**k move. So, please, please choose kindness over violence.
Inspiration: On a spring day not too long ago, I finally had the time and mental bandwidth to tackle a few new recipes, one of which was homemade sprinkles. Despite watching a baker on television make these tiny sugar-based decorations on an immensely truncated timetable, I felt their simplicity must be too good to be true.
It wasn’t.
Turns out sprinkles (or the name you feel most comfortable using) are dead easy to make. Five ingredients plus time — that’s it. Well, and some space to let the baking sheets sit unmolested by either a curious housemate or a stray fruit fly until they are dry.
The upside of freshly made sprinkles is they not only add a unique crunchy texture, but you can add extra flavor via these imperfectly perfect sugar toppings. Vanilla, lemon, cran-orange, ube…basically (almost) anything you can dream up, can put in sprinkles to enhance or compliment the base flavor of your bakes.
Helpful Hint From Me To You: You want to ensure your mixture remains on the thick side. If it’s too runny, you’ll encounter a similar problem I had when piping, i.e., flowing unbidden from the pastry bag in shapeless lines.
Not that this gaffe dampened the joy of making my own sprinkles! More importantly, be prepared for the question (if you live with someone else): Why is everything we own sticky?
Because powdered sugar, corn syrup, and water are extremely STICKY!
Agatha Christie: It’s easy enough to see, in one’s mind’s eye, Miss Marple, Tuppence, and Lucy Eyelesbarro patiently piping out sheets and sheets of hundreds-and-thousands for a Christmas pudding, birthday cake, or Halloween treats.
Making the confection in question just a tad more special.
BTW: I’m not sure what exactly possessed me to pick Peril at End House for this photo (other than I liked the cover). Mainly because within the rolls of Miss Marple mysteries, there’s one that actually features sprinkles!
Though, weirdly enough, I enjoy airports. All the different people mingling together, the opportunity to study them whilst standing in lines, and the eccentric selection of goods and services one can find leading to the terminals fascinate me.
I think this love stems from my parents taking me to watch airplanes take off and land as a small kid. On those evenings, when the terminals were quiet, I would tire myself out running hither, thither, and yon.
And all it cost was the price of a partial tank of gas.
Of course, these were the days before you needed a ticket to pass beyond the TSA’s metal detectors.
Interestingly, my first-ever flight didn’t frighten me at all. In point of fact, I found it exhilaratin, probably because the Captain spotted a pod of blue whales swimming in the Pacific Ocean and tipped the plane so we could see them too! Even thousands of feet in the air, these sea-faring mammals were monstrous in size, and I cannot help but thank this unknown Captain for showing them to us.
(Not my photo, my little Kodak Brownie camera did not capture this much detail. Nor, thankfully, did we get this close in a 737. Thanks to Unsplash for this image.)
However, sometime betwixt my 18th and 23rd birthdays (when I took my second flight), this wonder transformed into terror — that I’ve yet to shake….Despite boarding a plane about once or twice a year. (Until Covid, when my long-range travel came to a standstill.)
In any case, since then, I have discovered a few tricks to get me onto the plane. One of which is providing myself with something to look forward to on the other end. This helps curtail a nearly irresistible impulse to bolt from the plane, down the terminal, and out of the airport while declaring, “This is my new hometown now.” (When flying home.)
In this instance: Golden, Colorado.
Though a wonderful city, this sea-level girl did not exactly thrive at altitude. And yet, I still needed something besides my own bed to get my sneakers to stay still.
Then, King Arthur Baking Company sent me an email about a sale on their baking supplies.
Inspiration and credit card in hand, I ordered a modest assortment of specialized ingredients from their website. Amongst which was a bag of Harvest Grains Blend, which included a recipe for a new-to-me type of bread.
And it turned out beautifully.
Despite needing to substitute actual milk for powdered milk called for in the recipe, which I didn’t have on hand. And, since I was already straying off the beaten path, I swapped malt powder for white sugar. Since my palate thinks the flavor of malt pairs better with wheat than plain sugar. (I also used their Climate Change wheat blend, which paired beautifully with the grains and malt.)
Nutty and full of flavor, it made excellent sandwiches!
Christie: Speaking of sandwiches…..I think Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp would appreciate this loaf. Especially since I see both men as sandwich enthusiasts. Japp, whilst he staking out a person or place for either Poirot or his superiors. Unsurprisingly, I think Hastings would do the same whilst helping Poirot. Though, as an added wrinkle, I can also see Hastings making a sandwich or two for dinner during his bachelor days!
Inspiration: Whilst shopping in my favorite spice shop, I spotted several bottles of mustard seeds and vaguely recalled a homemade mustard recipe I’d glanced at in one of my cookbooks. So I grabbed bottles of yellow, brown, and black seeds.
After taking a closer look at the Spicy Brown Mustard Recipe Master Recipe in Joseph Shuldiner’sThe New Homemade Kitchen, I discovered mustard is dead easy to make.
Seriously.
Seeds, salt, spices, vinegar, and time. That’s it. And let me tell you, it smells and tastes great! I highly recommend giving this condiment a whirl, as watching the seeds slowly absorb the vinegar is wild!
Helpful Hint from Me to You: Though the recipe says you can blend the seeds in a blender to create the finished product. Unless you own one of those fancy high-speed ones (and even then, I’m not sure as I don’t own one myself), this is the wrong tool for the job.
Choose the food processor option!
Otherwise, you could end up like me with a kitchen inexplicably covered in clumped-up seeds, despite the care taken when transferring the concoction from vessel to vessel!
Next: Halve the recipe.
Until you get the flavor combo to your liking, at least, as it turns out that this particular recipe makes about two and a half cups of the finished product.
Now, if you go through this whole-grain mustard like water, then the sheer volume this recipe produces isn’t a problem. However, if you don’t, it makes noodling with the recipe challenging.
One Last Thing: In future batches, on top of the aforementioned halving, I’m going to double the amount of Madras Curry Powder added (the additional flavor I chose for this trial run). Turns out, the spiciness of the brown mustard seeds and the tang of the apple cider vinegar wholly overshadow the curry powder. (i.e., I can’t taste it.)
Agatha Christie: Honestly? I can easily see Miss Marple, Tuppence, and Superintendant Battle making their own mustard…And closely guarding their version’s recipe!
Can you imagine trying to crowbar the list of secret ingredients from any one of them? And even if they did, finally, relent….Would they actually hand over the complete list or hold one or two back?
Inspiration: Scratch-made soda bread doesn’t hold the same level of malevolence that madeleines once held for me, but in the past, I’ve struggled to produce this style of bread. My efforts looked okay as I mixed them up, and they smelled delicious as they baked….but the end product was less than stellar.
The fruit caught in the oven, the center was underdone, and the texture was wildly tight. But since those dark, dark days, I’ve acquired a reliable thermometer to test the doneness, learned that after adding the buttermilk to the dry ingredients, you must not tarry in getting the dough into the oven and that I didn’t need to knead the dough the way I did my regular sandwich loaf. With these tidbits of knowledge tucked away in the back of my brain, when I spotted the recipe for a Small-Batch Irish Brown Soda Bread on page 31 of 32 in the March/April 2025 Cook’s Illustrated magazine — a small kernel of confidence sparked in the back of my mind.
(Especially since it didn’t call for any dried fruit.)
The only catch? I didn’t have any buttermilk on hand. However, as it turns out, this wasn’t a deal breaker as the recipe writer included instructions on making this loaf ahead of time (i.e., assembling all the dry ingredients), which uses buttermilk powder and water, which I did have on hand, I set to work.
(My unbaked loaf & the magazine where I discovered the recipe.)
It took me longer to measure all the ingredients than it did to produce the round of shaggy loaf of dough(that I promptly shoved into the oven).
Even better? It turned out perfectly on my very first try!
The upside to the Small-Batch Irish Brown Soda Bread is that the small loaf doesn’t feel like a faff. The ease it takes to produce is equal to its tastiness, and it is a loaf I can make on the fly.
Though I haven’t figured out how to keep the fruit some soda bread recipes require from singing while baking, I can happily put Small-Batch Irish Brown Soda Bread in my arsenal of reliable recipes!
Christie: I can easily see Chief Inspector Japp whipping up this loaf to accompany some leftover chicken soup or beef stew, so there’s a new penny at that evening’s meal! (Plus, a hearty bread helps fill the belly if there isn’t as much leftover in question as your memory thought there was in the fridge!)
Inspiration: After reading The Spellshop and all its lovely sounding jams, I couldn’t shake the hankering for jam. Then, I spotted a great deal on fresh blueberries at my local grocery store. Grabbing a couple of extra lemons, with visions of jam dancing in my head, we set out for home.
A couple of days later, with The New Homemade Kitchen open at my elbow, I started making blueberry jam.
Using the book’s simple recipe, with The Spellshop‘s main character’s method hanging about the back of my brain, I combined the sugar, berries, and lemon juice, then added a bit of cinnamon for depth of flavor. After the hot mixture finished roiling and boiling in the pot, I ladled the finished product into warmed jars.
The berries, sugar, & lemon juice macerating!
Then, using a double boiler, I melted wax. Please don’t get mad at using wax to seal the jars. Only after starting the jam process did I figure out I didn’t have any more of the proper lids for sealing them off with a water bath, but I did have wax. Hence, it’s what I used.
(For those who might be confused, wax sealing jam jars is no longer considered the safest method. However, since it will live in the fridge and will undoubtedly get eaten before any mold should start growing, I went with it.)
Christie: Whilst an entirely different book series inspired this culinary creation, I still can see Tuppence and Miss Marple making and bottling jam made of summertime fruits. Whilst Tommy, Poirot, and Hastings enjoy the results!
BTW: This pic was taken before I figured out I needed to have five rows of three in the pan not four in order to make these into nice pull apart rolls!
Endeavoring to improve my bread game, I decided to try these honey-wheat dinner rolls. A tad trepidatious, as this style of roll was one I absolutely loathed eating back in grade school; I still decided to give this recipe a go — mainly because I couldn’t recall WHY I disliked them.
In the past, I’ve struggled with consistently producing golden brown well-risen rolls. Pull-apart rolls, in particular, pose an even bigger challenge.
I had no clue why….until now.
Turns out the reasons for my floundering was, of course, self-inflicted. Thanks to America’s Test Kitchen’s book, Bread Illustrated, I discovered that not only was I not putting enough of the raw dough balls into the pan when getting ready to bake them. (Apparently, their personal bubble is much smaller than mine.)
I also discovered I was using the entirely wrong kind of yeast!
Never once did it cross my mind that instant or rapid-rise yeast differs from regular old active dry yeast. However, I did discover, through trial and error over the years, that my bakes always seemed to come out better when I bloomed the yeast first and then added the rest of the ingredients. I’m unsure why I finally twigged to the discrepancies between types of yeasts while reading the ingredient list this time, but I did. Thus, I’m passing on my slightly mortifying ‘aha!’ moment in case it helps someone else.
Other than still blooming the yeast first, as I’d no rapid-rise yeast in the house, I followed the recipe to the letter. And, as you can tell from the pic above, the rolls turned out great!
And I finally recalled why my younger self disliked them.
It turns out, even back in the day, I didn’t like the extra sweetness the honey gave the roll, especially when served next to a savory dish.
Changing It Up: The next time I whipped them up, I swapped the honey out for Barley Malt Syrup, which not only has a similar consistency to honey, but it’s not nearly as sweet. Moreover, its malty taste pairs well with wheat.
The second iteration was definitely an upgrade! (In our household at least.)
From Me To You: If you use the King Arthur Climate Blend Wheat Flour in these rolls, be prepared to add a touch more AP flour or bread flour to the dough. Otherwise, the dough is too loose and sticky to form proper rolls and looks nothing like the nice dough ball pictured in Bread Illustrated. No clue why, but so far, it’s happened every time I’ve made this recipe.
Christie: Though I don’t think these rolls are quite posh enough for Poirot, I can easily see Hastings cleaning the last remnants of stew or soaking up the last bit of soup broth left in his bowl!
(Sorry, I don’t have link to the recipe. ATK charges for the bulk of their recipes, so either you can purchase BreadIllustrated, subscribe to their website, or try a similar recipe from someplace else. I will say ATK’s BreadIllustrated is absolutely fantastic and worth purchasing if you’re new or an experienced baker!)
Inspiration: Customizable Slice-and-Bake Butter Cookies
If you’re looking for an easy make-ahead cookie dough that will wow the masses, this is the one for you! I’ve a similar cookie in my repertoire already, but it turns out you can do way more with the dough than I’d ever dreamed.
Initially, I found this recipe in a magazine, but it turns out America’s Test Kitchen made a YouTube video about these cookies, which is below.
The version I made was Raspberry-Cinnamon. After making the dough, you blitz down freeze-dried raspberries to the size of atoms, strain the seeds out, and sprinkle the powder on the cookies directly after they exit the oven.
Hilariously, the group sampling my efforts was a bit unsure about the powdery topping. But trusting I wouldn’t send along something awful, they nibbled…and nibbled…and nibbled them. After four or five cookies, they decided the mouthfeel was just a tad grainy. Then, they proceeded to hoover up all forty cookies over the next couple of hours.
So, this was not a make-or-break feature, and, in fairness, I did get a bit heavy-handed when sprinkling the powder.
Christie: I can see Tuppence making these cookies for one bake sale or another, especially since this style of slice-and-bake butter cookie can be whipped up one day and baked the next. An outstanding feature in a homemade cookie, as it doesn’t require a huge time sink on either day!
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
You must be logged in to post a comment.