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Dominoes
Make "Mrs. Jennison's sponge cake," bake in long pie-tins (two such tins will make twelve dominoes, and if no more are required, the rest of the batter may be baked in a loaf). The batter in the pie-tins should not be more than one-third of an inch deep; spread it evenly, and bake in a quick oven. Have a brown paper nearly twice the size of the cake on the table, and the moment one of the cakes comes from the oven turn it upside down in the center of the paper, spread it with a thin layer of currant jelly, and lay the other cake on it upside down, cut it with a hot, sharp knife lengthwise, directly through the center, then divide it across in six equal parts, push them with the knife about an inch apart, and ice them with ordinary white icing, putting a large dessert-spoonful on every piece; the heat of the cake will soften it, and with a little help the edges and sides will be smoothly covered. All of the icing that runs over on the paper may be carefully taken up and used again. It must then dry, which it will do very quickly. Make a horn of stiff white paper about five inches long, one and a half inches across the top, and one-eighth of an inch at the other end; put in it a dessert-spoon of dark chocolate icing, close the horn at the top, and pressing out the icing from the small opening, draw a line of it across the center of every cake, and then make spots like those on ivory dominoes; keep the horn supplied with icing. In the Kitchen.
A decorated petit-four rather than a cake in its own right: two wafer-thin sponge sheets sandwiched with jelly, cut into bars and glazed to look like ivory dominoes. Almost everything depends on working fast while the cake is still hot.
- The hinge: ice while hotThe recipe relies on the cake's own heat to melt the icing and pull it smoothly over the edges and sides. Have the jelly loosened, the icing mixed to a thick pouring consistency, and the paper laid out before the tins come out of the oven. If the sponge cools, the icing sets in ridges instead of flowing.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally rendered as roughly 400-425F. At that heat a sheet only one-third of an inch deep will likely be done in well under ten minutes, so watch it rather than time it; the edges will pull from the tin and the surface will spring back.
- Long pie-tinsEvidently long, shallow oblong tins rather than round pie plates. Any shallow rectangular pan, lined and lightly greased, does the same job. Two sheets are needed, so bake in sequence if you have only one pan.
- Mrs. Jennison's sponge cakeA separate recipe given elsewhere in the same book. Any plain sponge or genoise batter behaves the same way here. What matters is that it be spread evenly to a third of an inch.
- Brown paperSubstitute parchment. The paper is a work surface, not a liner for the pan, and it is nearly twice the size of the cake so the overflowing icing can be scraped up and reused.
- Currant jellyStir the jelly smooth, or warm it briefly, before spreading. Set jelly straight from the jar will tear a sponge this thin.
- The paper hornA cornet piped freehand, of a piece with the parchment cone still used for fine line work. A small parchment cone or a piping bag with a fine plain tip gives a comparable thread of chocolate icing (the recipe's own opening is one-eighth of an inch); a bag will hold more than a dessert-spoon at a time.
- YieldTwo tins give twelve pieces: the sandwiched sheet is cut lengthwise down the centre and then across into six. Any batter left over after filling the two tins may be baked in a loaf, as the recipe notes.
Dominoes belong to the Victorian fashion for cakes cut small and decorated to imitate something else, the same impulse behind checkerboard cakes and marzipan fruit. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Minneapolis in 1877 and reprinted for decades) is largely a plain-cooking book compiled from contributed household recipes, and entries like this one carry a credit line -- here "In the Kitchen," the title of another nineteenth-century cookery book. The ivory-and-black colour scheme is not decorative whimsy: dominoes were a standard parlour game, and the joke reads best if the icing is a flat opaque white, which is why the recipe calls for "ordinary white icing" flooded on while the cake is hot rather than a buttercream.