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Patty Pan Cakes
Bake molasses cup cake (after receipt given in this book) in tea cups half filled, and ice with chocolate icing. Bake gold and silver cakes in small patty pans (not deep,) flavor with orange and lemon, and stick together one of each with plain icing. Orange icing is nice for the tops.
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have the book's molasses cup cake and its gold and silver cakes, and tells you what shapes and icings to give them for a supper table. A few of its vessels and terms need translating.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tins originally meant for patties, that is, little pastries. The nearest modern equivalent is a mini-muffin or shallow tartlet tin. The parenthetical "not deep" is consistent with cakes flat enough to sandwich in pairs, as the receipt directs.
- Baking in tea cupsThe receipt assumes a cup sturdy enough to go in the oven; some period earthenware and ironstone would take the heat, but this cannot be assumed of any given cup. Modern bone china and anything with metallic decoration should not be used. Use ovenproof ramekins or a standard muffin tin instead.
- Half filledCup cake batters rise considerably, and filling only halfway leaves room for that rise rather than overflow. Hold to it whatever vessel you use.
- Gold and silver cakeA matched pair of batters from the same era of thrift: gold cake uses egg yolks only, silver cake the whites. They were baked together so no part of the egg was wasted. Baking both is the point of the pairing here.
- Cup cakeThe name derives from a cake measured by cupfuls rather than weighed, though by this period it was also used for small cakes baked in cups. The molasses version will be darker and softer than the gold and silver batters.
- Oven and timingThe receipt gives no oven heat or time. Small cakes are usually baked in a moderate oven; judge by size and test with a skewer, as overbaked gold cake goes dry quickly.
- Plain and orange icingPlain icing here is confectioners' sugar beaten with a little water or egg white to a spreading consistency, used as glue between the two halves. For the orange icing, use fresh juice and a little grated zest in place of the water; the colour will be pale, and the older trick of rubbing a sugar lump on the zest was one way to deepen it.
- Yield and servingSandwiched patty-pan cakes are two-bite items; the molasses cups are a portion each. The receipt gives no yield, which depends entirely on the batch sizes of the cakes referred to elsewhere in the book.
Supper was the light evening meal, and its sweets were expected to be small, pretty and made from batters already in the cook's repertoire. That is exactly what this entry does: it takes three cakes given elsewhere in the book and dresses them for the table, which is why it reads as a set of directions rather than a receipt with ingredients. Recipes that used only yolks and only whites were published as pairs so a household could bake both on the same day and waste no eggs, and the visual contrast between the deep yellow and the near-white crumb was treated as a decorative feature in itself. The patty pan is older still, named for the small patties it was first made for, and had been fully absorbed into cake baking.