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GATEAU (a la Ceylon)
Take a pound of sponge or cocoa-nut cake, bake it in a shallow tin, then cut it into rounds of equal thickness with graduated cutters. The centres should be removed with a small cutter, and the slices piled one on another. Then mask the edges with some white icing, and sprinkle with grated cocoa-nut. Then cut up half a pound of glace cherries and the same weight of green almonds, or other green fruit, and place them artistically between the tiers while the icing is moist. The centre should be filled with whipped cream flavoured with vanilla. Then take some whipped cream and little piles of the two fruits, and arrange round the cake. Sprinkle the cream with cocoa-nut. Probable cost, 3s.
A Victorian assembly job rather than a baking one: the cake is a vehicle for coconut, cream and candied fruit, built as a stepped tower. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens at the assembly stage.
- The hinge: work while the icing is wetGlacé icing (icing sugar slaked with a little hot water) skins over in minutes and sets in under an hour. Have the fruit cut, the coconut grated and all the rounds cut before a drop of icing is mixed, or the cherries and green fruit will not stick.
- "A pound of sponge or cocoa-nut cake"Since the recipe goes on to say "bake it in a shallow tin", this most likely means a pound of cake mixture rather than a pound of finished cake bought in. The original gives no proportions, so the mixture cannot be pinned to a particular number of eggs.
- A shallow tinBake in a single sheet about 1 inch deep — a Swiss roll tin or quarter sheet pan works. The recipe gives no oven heat or baking time; something around 350F for 20-25 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent. The cake must be low and even so the stacked rounds sit flat.
- Graduated cuttersA nested set of plain round cutters, cut from largest to smallest. The recipe does not say how many tiers, so the number depends on the set. The centres are removed with the smallest cutter so the stack forms a well.
- Green almondsThis may mean blanched almonds coloured green, as was done in confectionery of the period, though fresh unripe almonds were also sold under that name. The recipe's "other green fruit" points to something like candied angelica or glace greengage; angelica is the easiest to find and gives the same effect.
- Grated cocoa-nutFresh coconut grated on the coarse side of a box grater is what is meant; desiccated coconut is drier and duller but acceptable. Fresh grated coconut is perishable and the finished cake should be kept cold.
- White icingThe recipe says only "white icing". Glace suits this method better than royal: royal dries hard and will crack when the tiers are pressed together, while glace stays tacky long enough to bed the fruit in.
- Cream and keepingWhip to soft peaks only — the cream fills a well and pipes into little heaps, and over-whipped cream will bead once it sits. Assembled, this is a refrigerator cake: make it the day it is served and hold it cold.
- Yield and costThe original gives neither. Built into tiers, a pound of cake mixture would plausibly serve eight or so as a dessert course. The 3s. quoted was a real outlay at a time when a labouring wage was a matter of a few shillings a day — cream, glace cherries and imported coconut were all comparatively costly.
In late-Victorian menu French, à la Ceylon is often said to have been shorthand for coconut, much as à l'Indienne meant curry — Ceylon, then a British colony and now Sri Lanka, was the source of much of the coconut and coconut oil reaching British ports, and the name lent a fashionable colonial gloss to what is essentially a stacked sponge. Cassell's, an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at the middle-class household with a cook, is full of these decorative set pieces: dishes whose difficulty lies not in cooking but in presentation, meant to be carried whole to the table and admired before being cut. The graduated-cutter construction, with the centre removed and filled with cream, belongs to the same confectioner's tradition that produced the croquembouche.