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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Cakes
ORANGE CAKES Cream together one-half cupful of butter, one cup of sugar, add the yolks of five eggs beaten thick, one-half cupful of milk, one and three-fourths cupfuls of flour sifted with two level teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Add one teaspoonful of orange extract. Roll out and cut in star or other fancy shape. Cover with yellow orange flavored fondant, and sprinkle over the top with candied orange peel cut into bits.
COCOANUT DROPS Sift together one and one-half cupfuls of flour and a rounding teaspoonful of baking-powder. Beat up one egg until light, then beat into it one-half cupful of sugar, add a half cupful of grated cocoanut and a teaspoonful of grated lemon rind, then alternately the flour and half a cupful of rich cream. Drop in little pats on greased pans which have been dusted with flour. Have the cakes far enough apart so that the batter will not run together. Sprinkle a little grated cocoanut over the top of each cake and bake in a moderate oven. ALMOND CAKES Mix together one-fourth cupful of butter and a cupful of sugar to a cream, add the beaten yolks of four eggs, one-fourth cupful of cream and two cupfuls of flour in which has been placed one teaspoonful of baking-powder. Roll out on a well-floured board about one-fourth of an inch thick, cover with powdered sugar and cut into diamonds. Spread with maple fondant, and sprinkle the cakes thickly with blanched and chopped almonds.
Three short recipes for what are really rolled or dropped cookies, finished like confectionery rather than like cake. The book gives no temperatures or times, and two of the doughs are softer than the instruction to roll them out suggests.
- They are cookies, not cakesThey are cookies rather than cakes in the modern sense -- "Cakes" here is used of small flat sweets. The almond cakes are rolled about a quarter-inch thick; the orange cakes are rolled and cut but no thickness is given, and the coconut drops are dropped from a spoon and are not glazed.
- Oven and timeThe book calls for a "moderate oven" only in the coconut drops; the other two recipes give no oven instruction. A moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. The following are estimates rather than the book's: thin rolled pieces likely need 8 to 12 minutes and should be pulled while the centres are still pale; the drops perhaps 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges set.
- The doughs need chillingThe doughs are slack -- Half a cupful of milk against one and three-fourths cupfuls of flour in the orange cakes, and a quarter cupful of cream against two cupfuls of flour in the almond, make doughs unlikely to roll straight from the bowl. Chill a couple of hours, work with a floured board and pin, and roll in batches keeping the rest cold rather than beating in more flour.
- CocoanutPeriod coconut is unsweetened, finely grated and fairly moist. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the drops cloying and coarse; use unsweetened desiccated or fine-shred coconut.
- "Rich cream"Heavy or whipping cream. Half-and-half will work but gives a flatter, drier drop.
- Baking powderModern double-acting powder may behave more strongly than some of the powders sold when this book was written. Measure the teaspoonfuls level, and take "rounding" in the coconut drops as a generous level teaspoon rather than a heaped one.
- Fondant, and how to use itThe yellow and maple fondants are poured coatings, presumably from a fondant recipe elsewhere in the book, not stiff rolled fondant. Warm cooked fondant gently over hot water until it flows in a ribbon, then dip or spoon it over completely cooled cakes; overheating dulls it and makes it grainy. Thinned royal icing or a stiff glace icing is the practical substitute.
- Yolks and leftoversFive yolks and four yolks leave a bowl of whites; save them for meringue or macaroons rather than pouring them off.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; expect roughly two to four dozen small pieces from each, depending on the cutter.
These belong to the confectioner's side of the kitchen rather than the baker's: thin plain biscuits used chiefly as a base for fondant, of the kind a candy-making book would treat alongside creams and bonbons. The result is a homemade cousin of the petit four glace, and the flavourings track what a middle-class pantry could buy - bottled orange extract, candied peel, grated coconut, and maple sugar as a distinctly North American alternative to vanilla. Shredded coconut had become widely available in packets in the decades before this book, which is why a recipe can call for half a cupful of it without further explanation.