Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rings of Pastry, Ornamental
Rings of Pastry, Ornamental
Roll out some puff-paste to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Stamp it out in rounds an inch and a half in diameter, and cut out the centre of these with a smaller cutter, half an inch in diameter. Brush the rings over with beaten egg, shake finely-powdered sugar over them, and bake them on a slightly-buttered baking-sheet in a gentle oven till they are lightly browned. Cover with sugar icing, put them in a cool oven or in a screen to dry, and ornament with dots or folds of bright-coloured jelly. Or, blanch some almonds, and chop them small. Put them in a bowl, and beat them up with a little white of egg and powdered sugar; brush the rings with egg, and strew the chopped almonds over them. Bake in a gentle oven, and a minute or two before they are taken out put a preserved cherry, well drained from the syrup, in the centre of the ring. When lightly coloured take out the rings, and put them on a wire sieve to cool. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour.
These are garnish pastries — small glazed puff rings meant to dress a dish of cream, trifle or compote rather than to be eaten alone. The recipe assumes you already have puff paste and know how to handle it.
- The hinge: keep everything coldRings cut at an inch and a half across with a half-inch hole leave a band of pastry only half an inch wide, which warms and slumps almost at once. Cut them, lay them on the sheet, and chill 20-30 minutes before they go in the oven or they will distort and lose their layers.
- "Gentle oven"Roughly 325-350F in modern terms; period oven language is not precise. Puff paste normally wants 400-425F to rise properly, but egg wash and powdered sugar scorch quickly at that heat, so the lower heat trades some lift for colour. A quarter of an hour at that heat suits pieces this small.
- "Cool oven" and "screen"The drying stage after icing wants only a very low heat, perhaps 200-225F, or simply a warm dry spot. A screen was a panel set near the fire to hold warmth on one side; an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar does the same work.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term usually meant sugar broken and ground fine, closer to modern caster or superfine sugar than to confectioners' sugar. For the shaken coating before baking use caster; for the icing, confectioners' sugar beaten with a little water or egg white.
- Egg wash disciplineBrush the tops only. Egg running down the cut edges glues the layers together and the rings bake up flat instead of flaky.
- Blanching almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Dry them well before chopping or they will steam rather than toast.
- The cherryA preserved or glacé cherry, patted dry — added in the last minute or two so it warms and sets without weeping syrup onto the pastry.
- "Bright-coloured jelly"Redcurrant, quince or apple jelly, warmed slightly and piped or dotted on once the icing has dried. Firm jams work; anything loose will bleed into the icing.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of paste; as a rough guide, half a pound rolled a quarter-inch thick should give something on the order of two to three dozen rings, depending on how thriftily you re-roll the trimmings.
The title places these under ornamental work rather than among the biscuits, and that is the point of them: late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner service treated a sweet dish as something to be built up and dressed, and a cook might be expected to keep a stock of small glazed or almonded pastries to set around a cream, a jelly or a compote of fruit. The two variations given here — white icing with dots of coloured jelly, or chopped almonds with a cherry in the centre — are a familiar confectioner's pair, colour against pale ground. The instruction to dry the icing in a screen is a reminder of how recently this book stood between the open range and the closed oven: a screen was warm-fire equipment, and it survives in the text alongside a cool oven.