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Tipsy Cake, Imperial
Proceed as for tipsy cake, using pistachios in place of almonds. The fruit for the top decoration should be pink and yellow, glace or crystallised, and a pink pear should be placed at the top, or an orange and an apricot may be used. Some French plums should be cut up and mixed amongst the fruit, and about a pound of plums must be made into a compote and put in the dish in place of custard, a little pink custard only being used. In place of the latter any nice pink sauce may be used, or tinted whipped cream. Some of the pistachios are to be placed here and there on the custard. A wine of good quality should be used for soaking, with a gill of brandy to each half bottle.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have Cassell's basic tipsy cake in front of you — a whole sponge or Savoy cake soaked in sweet wine, stuck all over with blanched almond spikes, and set in a pool of custard. The changes here are decoration and liquid, so read the parent recipe first.
- The hinge: soak slowlyThe cake must absorb the wine over hours, not minutes, or the outside collapses while the centre stays dry. Spoon the wine over a firm, day-old sponge in stages and let it stand covered in a cool place until the liquid is taken up.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. With a half bottle of wine (roughly 375 ml) that gives a strongly alcoholic cake — something like a quarter of the soaking liquid is brandy, and none of it is cooked off.
- French plumsThese are prunes — dried plums, of the kind imported from France. The pound made into compote appears to mean a pound of the dried fruit, stewed in syrup until tender, and it replaces most of the custard as the surrounding sauce.
- Pistachios in place of almondsTipsy cake is customarily stuck with blanched almonds split into spikes. Pistachios need blanching too: pour boiling water over the shelled nuts, stand two minutes, then rub off the skins to get the green.
- Pink custardVictorian pink came from cochineal. Any modern colouring works, or use a raspberry syrup to tint the custard or cream, which also carries flavour rather than just colour.
- Glace and crystallised fruitPink and yellow means glace cherries, apricots, candied pear and orange. A whole glace pear is now hard to find; halved candied apricots and orange slices, as the recipe itself allows, are the practical substitute.
- Assemble lateWine-soaked sponge slumps and glace fruit weeps colour into custard. Soak the cake ahead, but spike the nuts, spoon round the compote and set the fruit on top no more than an hour or two before serving.
- YieldA tipsy cake of this kind, with a pound of prune compote, will serve eight to ten. Not one for children, given the uncooked brandy and wine.
Tipsy cake is the English cousin of trifle: a device, generally traced to the eighteenth century, for making a stale sponge or Savoy cake worth eating again by drowning it in sweet wine, bristling it with almond spikes — hence the other old name often given to it, hedgehog cake — and drowning the base in custard. Cassell's, compiled from the 1870s onward for households with a cook and an eye on French fashion, does what that period habitually did with a plain English pudding: renames it Imperial, swaps the almonds for green pistachios, buries the custard under a prune compote and crowns it with tinted glace fruit. The result belongs to the same impulse as the moulded, coloured, architecturally arranged dinner-table sweets of the 1880s and 1890s, when a pudding was expected to be looked at before it was eaten. The heavy hand with brandy and good wine, meanwhile, is a reminder that this is a dish from a household where such things sat in the cellar rather than being bought for the occasion.