Home › Griddle Cakes › Cake for Card Party
Cake for Card Party
1 cupful molasses; 1 whole egg; yolk of extra one; 4 tablespoonfuls butter; 1/2 cupful sour milk; 1 level teaspoonful soda in milk; 2 cupfuls flour; pinch salt. Roll out with flour, bake quickly, ice with boiled icing, to which add 1 teaspoonful cinnamon; figures which represent the different suits of cards, cut from citron and candied cherries, are placed while the icing is soft.
This is a rolled molasses cookie dough, cut into rounds or squares and finished with boiled icing and cut-out card suits. The dough is soft and sticky, so chilling is the difference between clean shapes and a smeared sheet.
- Chill before rollingWith a cupful of molasses and four tablespoons of butter, the dough is far too slack to roll straight from the bowl. Wrap and refrigerate at least two hours, then roll about 1/4 inch thick on a well-floured board, working with a portion at a time and keeping the rest cold.
- "Bake quickly"The book gives no temperature, but the phrase points to a hot oven; somewhere around 400F is the usual modern reading. Molasses browns fast and scorches faster, so watch closely: the cakes may be done in well under ten minutes, when the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally soured raw milk, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Use buttermilk, or half a cup of whole milk with a scant half tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The level teaspoon of soda is dissolved in the milk before it goes into the dough.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the cinnamon icing.
- Cutting the shapesThe recipe assumes you know to cut the sheet into rounds or squares before baking. A 2 to 2 1/2 inch cutter gives a cake large enough to carry a citron heart or spade without crowding.
- Boiled icingBoiled icing is a syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238-240F, beaten into stiffly whipped egg whites until it holds a peak. It skins over within a few minutes, so set the citron and cherry suits in place as you ice each cake rather than icing the whole batch first.
- CitronCandied citron is the peel of a thick-rinded citrus, sold in blocks near the candied fruit around the winter holidays. It slices cleanly with a thin knife when cold; a small aspic cutter makes better clubs and diamonds than freehand cutting.
- YieldAbout three dozen cakes at 2 1/2 inches. They keep several days in a tin, though the boiled icing is at its best the day it is made.
Card-party refreshments were a fixed genre in American household books around 1900, when whist, euchre and later bridge structured a great deal of middle-class social evening entertaining, and hostesses were expected to produce something that acknowledged the occasion without requiring forks. The dough itself is the ordinary sour-milk molasses cooky found in dozens of contemporary collections, made presentable by a coat of boiled icing and a scrap of candied fruit cut into hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds. Citron and candied cherries were a common decorating pair of the era, being shelf-stable and widely sold.