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Tartlets, to Ornament
The usual way of ornamenting tartlets is to lay upon them pastry leaves, flowers, or other devices. These may be made of the trimmings of the pastry, and should be baked separately in a slow oven. Sometimes a tea-spoonful of whipped cream is substituted for the pastry. Ornaments for tartlets are made also of almond pastry prepared as follows. Pound and sift two ounces of loaf sugar, and mix with it two ounces of dried flour and an ounce of almonds pounded till smooth. Make this mixture into a stiff paste with the white of an egg well whisked with a table-spoonful of orange-flower water. Beat the paste, and roll it out as thin as possible. Stamp it into leaves, stars, flowers, half-crescents, or any other fancy shapes, and bake these in a slow oven till they are firm without being coloured. When cold they are ready for use. These ornaments may be kept between sheets of writing-paper in a tin box to be used when wanted.
TARTLET-TINS. (See illustration accompanying the article on ALMOND CHEESECAKES.)
Two techniques sit side by side here: leaves cut from leftover shortcrust, and a thin almond-and-egg-white paste stamped into shapes and dried out rather than browned. The almond paste is the part worth making, and the whole of its success is in the baking.
- The hinge: bake paleThe instruction "firm without being coloured" governs the whole thing; any browning and the ornaments look like biscuits rather than decoration. A slow oven of roughly 275-300F suits; start checking from about 12 minutes and pull them when they lift cleanly and feel dry.
- "A slow oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 275-300F. The recipe uses the same term for both the pastry trimmings and the almond shapes and gives no separate temperature for each. A range cooling down after a main bake would have supplied heat of roughly this order.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones and broken up as needed, which is why it has to be pounded and sifted. Use icing (confectioners') sugar and skip both steps; caster sugar will leave the paste slightly gritty.
- Dried flourFlour spread in a tin and left in a cooling oven to drive off moisture, so the paste stays stiff. Two ounces is about a scant half cup. Modern packaged flour is dry enough that you can use it as it comes.
- The almondsAn ounce of blanched almonds pounded smooth is roughly a quarter cup, ground fine. Commercial almond flour works and is more reliable than a food processor, which turns oily before it turns smooth.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and much stronger than the sweet cordial-like versions some cooks expect. A tablespoon in this quantity of paste is assertive but correct for the period; halve it if you want the almond forward.
- Rolling thinRoll between two sheets of parchment. The paste is stiff and short, and once it warms in the hands it cracks at the edges when stamped; chill it briefly if that starts happening.
- Yield and storageTwo ounces each of sugar and flour makes enough for three or four dozen small stamped shapes. "Between sheets of writing-paper in a tin box" means unglazed paper in an airtight container, and they will stay crisp for a couple of weeks that way, longer than the tartlets they garnish.
Cassell's is writing at a moment when a well-set dessert course was judged partly on its finish, and confectioners' pastes made of almonds, sugar and egg white were the standard material for that finish, as gum paste and royal icing were for larger set pieces. The technique is a domestic scaling-down of professional work, though the architectural detail of a pastry cook's centrepiece was more usually cut from gum paste or pastillage. Orange-flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, is often said to have been the characteristic sweet flavouring of English and French confectionery before vanilla came to predominate, though the timeline is not firmly settled. The instruction to keep the finished ornaments in a tin between sheets of paper suggests that decorations could be batched in quiet hours and drawn on when a dish had to be sent up, rather than made to order.