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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Make
FRUIT PUFFS Take five eggs and beat the whites and yolks separately, stir in gradually one and a half cupfuls of sugar, and one and a half cupfuls of flour into which has been sifted two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Bake in deep gem pans, filling about half full. Make a fruit filling as follows: Place in a saucepan one-half cupful of finely chopped figs, one-half cupful of dates, one-half cupful of chopped raisins and one-half cupful of water. Let simmer slowly for an hour, then add a teaspoonful of vanilla. Make slits in the sides of the cakes and fill in with this fruit mixture. Cover with icing or chocolate fondant.
NUT TARTS Prepare a short pastry crust, adding to the flour one tablespoonful of powdered sugar. Roll out very thin. Dip fancy cutters in flour and cut the pastry, then pierce the half of the cakes with a small circular cutter. Some of the cakes can be made with one hole, some two and some three. Place these on greased pans and bake in the oven a pale brown. After removing make a paste with the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs, two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped nut meats, two tablespoonfuls of maple sugar, and a little cream if the paste is too thick to spread nicely. Spread this on the cakes that have been left whole, and then place the cakes with the holes on top. Fill up the depressions or holes with jelly, marmalade or fondant.
Two small-cake recipes from the same page: a sponge batter baked in muffin tins and filled with dried-fruit paste, and a sandwich cookie of sugared short pastry. Neither gives an oven temperature, so the numbers below are the working assumptions.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe Fruit Puffs are a separated-egg sponge with no fat and no liquid beyond the eggs. Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick, fold in the sifted flour and baking powder, then fold in the whites last and only until no streaks remain. Stirring, as the text says, will knock the air out and give you flat, rubbery cakes.
- Deep gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin pans; the number and depth of the cups varied by pattern, and this recipe calls for the deep sort. A standard muffin tin is the nearest substitute. Half-full is correct for this batter, which rises high.
- Oven temperatureBake the puffs at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes, until they spring back. The nut tart pastry, rolled very thin, wants a hotter, shorter bake: 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, watching for the "pale brown" the recipe asks for and no further.
- The fruit filling and its waterHalf a cup of water for a cup and a half of chopped dried fruit is barely enough for an hour's simmer. Use the lowest heat, keep the pan covered, and add a spoonful of water whenever it threatens to catch. You want a thick spreadable jam, not caramel.
- Filling through slitsCutting a slit in the side and forcing filling in works better with a piping bag and a plain tip than with a knife. Let the cakes cool completely first, or the crumb will tear.
- Maple sugarGranulated maple sugar is still sold, generally near the maple syrup, but is not a supermarket staple. Two tablespoons of maple syrup will do the same flavour job in the nut paste, though it loosens the mixture further, so hold back the cream.
- The uncooked egg-white pasteThe nut filling is spread on already-baked cookies and never returns to the oven, so the whites stay raw. Use pasteurized egg whites if the tarts are for children, older eaters or anyone pregnant. The paste also weeps if it stands, so assemble the tarts the day they are served.
- YieldThe puff batter fills roughly a dozen standard muffin cups. The recipe gives no quantity of pastry for the tarts, so the count depends both on your batch size and your cutter; expect somewhere in the region of a dozen and a half finished sandwiches from an average batch cut at about two inches.
Both of these belong to the turn-of-the-century vogue for "little sweets" or fancy cakes: small, decorated, hand-held things meant for afternoon tea, card parties and the increasingly elaborate American reception table, where a hostess was expected to offer variety rather than one large cake. The fruit filling of figs, dates and raisins is characteristic of the period, when imported dried fruit from the Mediterranean and California had become cheap and reliable in urban groceries and was pressed into service for fillings, bars and steamed puddings alike. Maple sugar in the nut paste points the other way, to a domestic sweetener that in some regions was still kept in the pantry in cake form and grated as needed. The construction of the nut tarts, with a pierced top cookie laid over a spread base and the holes filled with contrasting jelly, resembles the Austrian Linzer cookie, though the likeness need not imply any direct borrowing.