Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bride Cake
Bride Cake
Commence operations by washing, picking, and putting two pounds of currants to dry before the fire, and then slicing thinly half a pound each of candied peels, orange, citron, and lemon. Next, bruise one pound of sweet almonds with a little orange-flower water, and pound a quarter of an ounce each of mace, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs to a powder. Wash four pounds of butter, and whip it to a cream; beat up the yolks and whites, separately, of eighteen or twenty eggs--the whites should be frothed. Get two pounds of sifted sugar, half a pint of brandy, and the same of sherry, and four pounds of Vienna flour, well dried and sifted. Put the creamed butter into a large basin, and by degrees mix in the sugar, stirring it constantly. Next add the frothed whites of the eggs, and beat all together with the yolks; then the almonds, spices, and, very gradually, the flour, till all are thoroughly blended. Beat well, and add the currants, sprinkling them in very gradually, so as to distribute them equally, and finish by making all smooth with the brandy and sherry. Keep up the beating till all is ready for the baking. A double paper, well buttered, must be put as a lining to the baking-tin, and the mixture should not fill the hoop more than three parts, that it may have room to expand. Put a paper over the top, and bake the cake in a moderately heated oven. Cover it with almond icing, allow it to dry, and then add ornamented sugar-icing, three-quarters of an inch in thickness. (See also Wedding Cake.) The bride cake shown in our illustration was made for the wedding of their Majesties King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra.
This is a full-scale Victorian bride cake — roughly sixteen pounds of batter before icing — and almost every instruction assumes a kitchen with a coal range, a cake hoop and someone strong enough to beat by hand for an hour. The quantities scale down cleanly by half or quarter if you want a cake that fits a domestic oven.
- The hinge: low heat, long bakeThe recipe gives no temperature. For a rich fruit cake of this size modern practice is a low oven, in the region of 275-300F rather than 350F, and a bake of several hours. The doubled buttered paper lining and the paper lid exist to keep the outside from setting and scorching before the centre is done. Test with a skewer, not by time.
- Washing the butterVictorian butter was salted for keeping and often rancid at the edges, so cooks kneaded it under cold water to draw out salt and buttermilk. With modern unsalted butter this step is unnecessary — simply soften it and cream it.
- Vienna flourA finely milled high-grade white flour, associated with Austrian milling and Hungarian wheat, prized for its whiteness and fineness. Plain (all-purpose) flour is a reasonable substitute here; drying and sifting it was to remove damp from storage and can be skipped.
- Sweet almonds and orange-flower water"Sweet" almonds are ordinary almonds, specified to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which are now restricted or hard to obtain in many places. Blanched almonds pounded to a paste with a little orange-flower water go into the batter; a food processor does in minutes what a mortar did at length.
- The spicesA quarter ounce is about seven grams, so roughly three to four teaspoons of each ground spice — a heavy hand by modern taste but correct for the style. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground loses most of its point.
- Eighteen to twenty eggsVictorian eggs generally ran smaller than today's large, so around sixteen large eggs is a fair equivalent for the full quantity. The frothed whites and the creamed butter supply all the aeration — there is no chemical raising agent — so fold rather than stir once the whites go in.
- The hoopA cake hoop is a bottomless metal ring set on a papered baking sheet. A deep springform or a tall cake tin, double-lined with buttered parchment and wrapped outside with brown paper, gives the same result. Fill no more than three-quarters, as stated.
- IcingThe almond icing must dry for a day or more before the sugar icing goes on, or the two will bleed together. Traditional royal icing at three-quarters of an inch thick is built up in several thin coats; note that it is uncooked egg white, so use pasteurised whites or dried albumen if the cake will be served to anyone vulnerable.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe gives a cake serving well over a hundred in the thin Victorian slices intended. With the brandy and sherry it will keep for months in a tin.
The bride cake is the direct ancestor of the modern tiered wedding cake: a dense fruit-and-spice cake, sealed in marzipan and armoured in hard white sugar icing, whose keeping qualities let households distribute slices by post after the ceremony and set a piece aside for a christening. The white icing became fashionable in Britain over the nineteenth century as refined loaf sugar grew cheaper, and the fashion for architectural, pillared cakes belongs to the same period. Cassell's note that the illustrated cake was made for the wedding of Edward VII and Alexandra points to March 1863, when they married at St George's Chapel, Windsor, as Prince and Princess of Wales — the book calls them "their Majesties" because it is writing after Edward's accession in 1901, nearly forty years on. Royal cakes appear in a number of Victorian and Edwardian cookery books, offering the reader the grandest table's formula in domestic quantities.