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Ice-Cream Cake (Make good sponge-cake bake)
Make good sponge-cake, bake half an inch thick in jelly-pans, and let them get perfectly cold; take a pint thickest sweet cream, beat until it looks like ice-cream, make very sweet, and flavor with vanilla; blanch and chop a pound almonds, stir into cream, and put very thick between each layer. This is the queen of all cakes. -Miss Mattie Fullington.
A whipped-cream layer cake with no frozen element at all — the name refers to the look of the beaten cream. Two things need attention: the cream must be heavy cream whipped only to stiff peaks, and the almond quantity is enormous by modern taste.
- "Thickest sweet cream"This means unsoured heavy cream with the highest fat content available — modern heavy whipping cream at 36% or above. A pint whips to roughly a quart, enough for three or four layers.
- "Beat until it looks like ice-cream"Stiff peaks, no further. Cream at that stage holds its shape when the beater is lifted; another thirty seconds turns it grainy and then to butter. Chill the bowl and beaters first.
- Sweetening and stability"Make very sweet" is undefined; 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per pint is a reasonable reading. Use confectioners' sugar rather than granulated — the cornstarch in it helps the filling hold overnight instead of weeping into the cake.
- The almondsA full pound of chopped almonds to a pint of cream gives a filling that is more nut than cream. Four to six ounces, toasted lightly, suits current palates and still reads as generous.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over the almonds, let them stand two minutes, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry them thoroughly before chopping or they will thin the cream.
- Jelly-pans and ovenJelly-pans are shallow 8- or 9-inch round tins. Sponge batter spread half an inch thick bakes in 10 to 12 minutes at 350–375F; watch it, as thin sponge overbakes fast and then cracks when rolled or stacked.
- Assembly and holdingThe layers must be completely cold, as the book says, or the cream slackens. Fill, then refrigerate at least an hour before cutting and keep it cold until it goes to the table.
- Yield and servingThree or four thin layers make a cake serving 8 to 10. It is at its best the day it is made; by the second day the sponge has absorbed the cream and gone soft.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877, out of Marysville and later Minneapolis) carried many recipes signed by the women who contributed them, and Miss Mattie Fullington's verdict — "the queen of all cakes" — is exactly the kind of household editorializing the compilers let stand. The name is worth pausing on: nothing here is frozen. Cakes built on a stiffly beaten sweetened cream filling do appear under the name "ice-cream cake" in late nineteenth-century American collections, though whether the name points to the look of the cream or simply to its richness is not something the recipe tells us. The pound of blanched almonds signals ambition rather than economy; almonds were largely an imported grocery item at this date and were often bought unblanched and blanched at home, and using a full pound in a single cake marked the dish as company food.