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Tipsy Cake
Take a moulded sponge or savoury cake three or four days old. Cut it quite level at the bottom, so that it will stand firmly on the dish, pierce it in several places with a skewer or knitting needle, and pour over it as much sweet wine mixed with two wine-glassfuls of brandy as it will absorb. Take up the liquor that flows into the dish, and pour it over again and again until the cake is quite soaked. Blanch two ounces of sweet almonds, split them into spikes, and stick them all over the cake. Pour round it a rich cold boiled custard, and it will be ready for serving. Sometimes the juice of half a lemon is mixed with the wine and brandy. Time, two hours to soak the cake. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine and brandy, 2s., if the custard is made with milk. Sufficient for a dish.
A Victorian trifle in its oldest form: one whole cake, soaked rather than layered, standing in a moat of custard. Almost everything hinges on the cake being dry enough to drink.
- Use a stale cake, deliberatelyThree or four days old is not a suggestion. A fresh sponge turns to paste under that much liquid; a dry one absorbs it and holds its shape. If your cake is fresh, split it and leave it uncovered overnight.
- "Savoury cake" is not savouryAlmost certainly Savoy cake, a plain egg-foam sponge baked in a tall fluted or turban mould, the spelling varying in nineteenth-century books. Any firm, low-fat sponge or angel-food style cake baked in a ring or bundt tin behaves the same way.
- Wine-glassfulReckon a wine-glass at about 2 fl oz, so two glasses of brandy is roughly 1/2 cup. The sweet wine is not measured at all; the recipe simply says as much as the cake will absorb, poured back over until it stops taking any up.
- Which sweet wineThe recipe specifies only "sweet wine"; sherry, madeira or marsala all suit, and sweet sherry is the usual choice in period versions. A modern dessert wine works.
- "Rich cold boiled custard"A stirred egg custard cooked on the stovetop, not baked and not actually boiled — hold it below 180F and pull it the moment it coats the spoon. Egg yolks with cream rather than milk is the "rich" version; the note about milk is a cost saving. Chill it thoroughly before it goes round the cake.
- AlmondsTwo ounces is roughly a third to a half cup of whole almonds. Blanch, slip the skins, then split each lengthwise along its natural seam while still damp and warm — dry almonds shatter instead of splitting.
- Soaking and servingTwo hours minimum, and the repeated basting matters: the liquid pools before it climbs. The recipe says only that it is "sufficient for a dish". It is strongly alcoholic with nothing cooked off, so it is not a dish for children.
Tipsy cake is closely related to the trifle — often linked to it, though the trifle is recorded the earlier of the two — and the name is plain enough: the cake is drunk. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery books carry it under "tipsy cake" or "tipsy hedgehog", the hedgehog names coming from exactly the trick described here, a whole soaked sponge bristling with split almonds set in custard; "tipsy parson" is genuine too, but chiefly American. It belongs to a wider family of dishes built on stale cake or biscuit softened with fortified wine, a thoroughly practical use for a sponge that had gone past its best in a household that baked large and often. It is less a baked thing than an assembly, and the costing in shillings — 2s. exclusive of the wine and brandy, which were the expensive part — gives some sense of what it cost to put on the table.