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VIENNA CAKE (a German recipe)
Make four or five white paper plates by stretching the paper over any round utensil-a large dinner or soup plate will do--plait up an edge an inch deep, and tack it round with needle and thread to keep it upright. Butter these papers, and lay them on baking-tins. Spread over each a layer of "sand tourte" mixture not thicker than a thin pancake. The sand tourte mixture is made thus. Stir half a pound of butter to a cream, then add the yolks of twelve eggs and half a lemon-peel grated. Add by degrees half a pound of sifted sugar, a quarter of a pound of fine flour, and the same of potato flour. When these ingredients are well mixed, add the egg-whites whipped to a snow. Bake the cakes in a moderate oven a nice yellow; do not let them tinge brown. When cold cut away the paper round, turn the cakes over, and peel off the bottom paper without breaking them. Lay one cake over the other, with different coloured preserves and marmalades between, till all are piled up. Dissolve powdered sugar with a little lemon-juice, spread it thickly over the top and sides of the cake to make a glazing. Put it into a cool oven to dry, and when cold ornament the top with preserved fruit or marmalade.
A Sandtorte batter baked as several wafer-thin discs and stacked with jam - essentially a Viennese layer cake built from sponge sheets rather than split rounds. Two things decide whether it works: the layers must stay pale, and they must come off their paper intact.
- Skip the paper platesThe improvised paper cases are simply a way of making shallow, flexible tins. Use four or five sheets of baking parchment on flat baking sheets, with a circle the size of the dinner or soup plate the original calls for drawn on each as a guide, or the bases of loose-bottomed sandwich tins lined with parchment. Modern parchment will generally release without the buttering, and the cakes should lift off without the breaking the original warns of.
- Potato flourThis means potato starch, sold as such or as potato flour in Continental and kosher groceries; it is not the same as the heavier, dull-grey potato flour milled from whole dried potato. Cornflour (cornstarch) is the closest substitute and gives a similar short, sandy crumb.
- Moderate oven350F/175C, but the layers are only a few millimetres thick and will be done in 8-12 minutes. Watch for the surface setting and the edges just colouring; the instruction not to let them tinge brown is the whole point of the cake's texture and appearance.
- Cool oven for the glazeAround 200-225F/95-110C, or the lowest setting your oven holds, for 15-20 minutes with the door ajar. The lemon-and-sugar coating is a water icing, not a boiled fondant, and only needs to lose its wet shine and form a dry crust.
- Twelve yolksWith half a pound each of butter and sugar and half a pound of combined flours, this is a large, very rich batter - expect a cake serving twelve to sixteen in small slices. Halving it works cleanly if you want two or three layers instead of five.
- Folding the whitesWhip to soft-peak snow rather than stiff and dry, and fold in in two additions. The batter is heavy with butter and yolk, and over-beaten whites will break down rather than lighten it.
- Peeling the layersLet each disc cool completely on its paper. Warm sponge of this thinness tears; cold, it lifts away cleanly. Trim all the discs to the same diameter with a plate and a knife before stacking so the sides can be glazed smoothly.
- The preservesUse thick, well-set jams and marmalades - apricot, redcurrant, damson, orange - and spread them thinly. Loose or syrupy preserve will soak the layers and make the stack slide apart under its own weight.
Sandtorte - literally sand cake - is a German and Austrian standard, generally said to be named for its crumb rather than any ingredient: the high proportion of starch to wheat flour gives a fine, dry, almost powdery texture that breaks like damp sand. Potato starch was one common choice in Central Europe, where it was cheap and widely milled, though cornflour and wheat starch are equally common in Sandtorte recipes. What this recipe presents here is the batter used not as a loaf but as thin sheets for a stacked, jam-layered cake in the Viennese manner, a style that reached British kitchens through the enthusiasm for Austrian and German confectionery in the second half of the nineteenth century. The homemade paper cases are a reminder of how limited a Victorian batterie de cuisine could be: shallow, wide, thin-gauge tins were not necessarily to hand, and a cook who wanted five identical sponge sheets might make her own moulds from paper and thread.