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Cream to Spread Between Cakes
One small bowl thick cream, whip it very stiff and sugar and vanilla to taste; have the cakes entirely cool before spreading the cream on; put cake in cool place until you wish to serve it. Sponge cake or angel food cake are both delicious baked on jelly tins and this cream between the layers.
A whipped cream filling with no measurements at all — workable once you fix the quantities and understand what "thick cream" and "jelly tins" meant.
- "One small bowl" is not a measureThe original gives no volume. A cup of cream whips to roughly two cups, which fills and lightly tops two 8-inch layers; use 1½ to 2 cups if you want a generous filling and a coating on top.
- Thick creamThis means cream with enough fat to whip — modern heavy or whipping cream, roughly 30 to 36% fat. Anything labelled light cream, half-and-half or single cream will not stiffen no matter how long you beat it.
- Sugar and vanilla to tasteStart with 1 to 2 tablespoons sugar per cup of cream and half a teaspoon vanilla. Confectioners' sugar dissolves without grit and its cornstarch gives a little insurance against weeping.
- Jelly tinsShallow round pans of the sort used for jelly-cake layers; the nearest modern equivalent is a thin layer pan. Sponge or angel food batter baked thin in two or three such pans gives the flat, tender layers this filling suits; a deep tube-pan angel food is harder to split evenly.
- The hinge: cakes entirely coolThe instruction is the whole point. Any residual warmth melts the cream on contact and it soaks into the crumb and slides out at the edges. Sponge and angel food need at least two hours, and angel food should cool inverted.
- Whip cold, and stop earlyChill the cream, bowl and beaters. Take it to firm peaks and no further — a few strokes past that and it goes grainy on its way to butter. Underwhipped cream will not hold between layers.
- "Cool place" means the refrigeratorUnstabilized whipped cream begins to weep within a few hours. Assemble the cake no more than three or four hours before serving and keep it refrigerated; it does not hold overnight without a stabilizer such as a little gelatin or mascarpone beaten in.
- YieldEnough for one two-layer thin cake, about eight to ten servings.
Before commercial buttercreams and shortening-based frostings took over American home baking, sweetened whipped cream was one of several common fillings for a light cake, alongside boiled icings, jellies and custards, and a book of breakfast, dessert and supper dishes might give no more than "to taste" and "one small bowl" rather than measurements. The pairing with angel food is telling: that cake, which uses a dozen whites and no yolks or butter, spread through American cookbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and its rise is often attributed to the arrival of reliable rotary egg beaters and fine white sugar, which are said to have made beating a great volume of whites practical in a home kitchen. Cream this thick came from a dairy or a farm can, skimmed off the top, and its use in a recipe like this suggests a household with some form of cold storage — the repeated insistence on a "cool place" goes some way toward explaining why such fillings stayed a fair-weather or icebox luxury.