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WAFER PAPER, TO PUT UNDER CAKES (a German recipe)
Take fine flour, to which put as much water as will make it beat smooth. Then by degrees add as much more as will bring it to a thin paste. Rub a baking-plate with wax, heat it, wipe off the wax, hold the tin again over the fire, then pour on it a spoonful of the flour and water, or as much as will cover the bottom thinly, and bake it merely so that it becomes dry and white.
A flour-and-water wafer sheet, baked pale and dry, to sit between a sticky cake and the plate. Two things decide whether it works: a batter thin enough to flow, and heat low enough that it never colours.
- The batterStart with flour and just enough water to beat out every lump, then thin it further until it pours like single cream and spreads on its own. The original gives no quantities; go entirely by how it flows.
- "Baking-plate"A flat sheet of tin heated directly over the fire, not an oven tray in the modern sense. A heavy skillet, a flat griddle or a crepe pan does the same job on a burner over low heat.
- The waxThe wax is a release coating, wiped off so only a film remains. Use food-grade beeswax if you use any at all; candle paraffin and furniture wax are not for cooking surfaces. A very lightly oiled pan wiped with paper achieves the same thing.
- Dry and white, not brownedThis is the hinge. The wafer must set and dry without taking any colour, so keep the pan barely hot. The recipe gives no temperature and does not use an oven.
- How thinA spoonful tilted around the pan to cover the base thinly. Anything thick enough to feel like a pancake will stay chewy in the middle and never dry through.
- StorageCool the sheets flat and keep them in a dry tin between paper. They absorb humidity quickly and go limp, which is why commercial wafer paper comes sealed.
- The shortcutReady-made wafer paper or rice paper, sold for Lebkuchen and macaroons, serves the same purpose and needs no pan, though modern sheets are usually starch-based rather than plain wheat flour and water. Buy it if you only want a base for one batch of cake.
Wafer paper of this kind -- Oblaten in German -- is the thin edible sheet laid under honey cakes and almond confections so the sticky base can be lifted from the tray without tearing. It belongs to the same broad wafer tradition that produced communion wafers and the crisp rolled wafers of medieval banquets, and it survives most visibly today under Nuremberg Lebkuchen, where the disc of pale wafer is part of the cake's identity.