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REVOLUTION CAKE (sometimes called Lafayette Cake)
Take a Savoy or Madeira cake which has been baked in a plain square mould, and cut it into slices a quarter of an inch in thickness. Spread some jam over these, and place five or six slices together, one on the top of the other. Whisk the whites of two eggs thoroughly, add half a pound of finely-sifted sugar, and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice or orange-flower water. Whisk the mixture until quite smooth, spread it evenly over the cake with the back of a spoon, and mark the shape of the pieces into which it is afterwards to be cut. Place the cake in a very cool oven to dry the icing. Two or three drops of cochineal will give it a rose tint. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient, one cake for three or four persons.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a baking one: a bought or leftover sponge, jam, and a royal icing dried rather than baked. Almost everything that can go wrong happens at the icing stage.
- The hinge: score before you dryMark the portions into the wet icing with a knife tip before it sets. Once the surface has dried hard it shatters under the blade, and no amount of warming the knife will give you clean squares.
- "A very cool oven"The aim is only to dry the icing, not to bake it: the residual heat of an oven that has been switched off, or the lowest setting with the door propped. Too much heat will colour the icing and soften the sponge. Left in a dry kitchen at room temperature the icing will set as well, though it may take longer.
- Savoy or Madeira cakeSavoy cake is a light whisked sponge, Madeira a firmer butter cake. Madeira holds up far better to being sliced a quarter-inch thin and stacked; a Savoy tends to tear. Bake it in an 8-inch square tin and let it sit a day so it firms.
- The icing quantitiesTwo egg whites to half a pound of sifted sugar is about 225g sugar to 60g of white. That is a soft, spreadable icing rather than the stiff royal icing of modern proportions, which takes considerably more sugar per white — which is why the recipe says to spread it with the back of a spoon. Sift the sugar; unsifted sugar leaves grit that shows on a flat spread surface.
- Raw egg whiteThis icing is dried, not cooked, so the whites never reach a safe temperature. Use pasteurised whites or meringue powder if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- CochinealThe Victorian bottle was carmine extracted from scale insects. It survives as E120/carmine; beetroot powder or a drop of commercial food colouring will do the same job. Two or three drops only — the pink should read as a tint.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and strength varies considerably between brands. Taste before you commit the full dessert-spoonful, or use the lemon juice, whose acid also helps the whites hold.
- Yield"three or four persons" suggests the cake was one item among others rather than the whole of a tea. Cut into small squares, a square cake stacked five or six slices deep will give noticeably more portions than that.
Cassell's offers both names without explaining either, which is typical of the period: cakes acquired patriotic labels the way streets did. The Lafayette name is generally traced to the Marquis de Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States in 1824-25, which left behind a scatter of Lafayette gingerbreads, Lafayette cakes and Lafayette puddings in nineteenth-century American cookbooks. What the recipe actually is, though, is a thrift dish dressed up — a way of turning a plain square sponge that has gone slightly dry into something fit for company, using jam and a hard white icing to disguise its age. Royal icing dried in the falling heat of a cooling oven would have been easy enough in a household with a coal range, where a barely-warm oven was available for hours after the day's baking was done.