Home › Small Cakes › Lady Fingers
Lady Fingers
Whisk 4 fresh eggs thoroughly, the whites and yolks separately. Mix smoothly with the yolks 3 ounces of powdered sugar and 3 ounces of flour; add the whites, and afterwards a quarter of a pint of rose-water. Beat all together for some minutes. Have ready a well-buttered baking-tin; form the paste upon it with a spoon in "fingers" three inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide, sift a little powdered sugar over them, let them stand five or six minutes to melt the sugar; then put them into a moderate over, and bake until they are lightly browned. When cool put them in pairs, and keep them in a tin canister, closely covered, until wanted for use. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Sufficient for two dozen fingers.
A plain sponge-finger batter of the older English type, leavened only by beaten egg. The success of it rests entirely on how much air you keep in the whites between folding and baking.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Sponge fingers of this size colour quickly, so watch them from the first sign of pale gold at the edges.
- The stated baking time is longTwenty minutes in a moderate oven will dry three-inch fingers to a biscuit. Modern practice is 8 to 12 minutes, until set and barely coloured.
- WeightsThree ounces of powdered sugar is a scant half cup; three ounces of flour is a generous half cup. Weigh rather than measure, since the flour-to-egg ratio is what keeps the fingers from collapsing.
- The rose-water quantity is doubtfulA quarter of a pint is five fluid ounces, which would reduce this batter to a pourable liquid and overwhelm three ounces of flour in both volume and flavour. Comparable period recipes call for a spoonful or two of rose-water as flavouring; treat the printed amount as unreliable rather than converting it literally.
- FoldingBeat the yolks with the sugar and flour first, then fold in the whipped whites in two additions with a spatula. The instruction to "beat all together for some minutes" is the one line to disregard, as extended beating knocks out the air the fingers depend on.
- ShapingA piping bag with a half-inch plain tip gives far more even fingers than a spoon, and even thickness matters for even baking. Pipe onto parchment rather than a buttered tin, spacing them an inch apart.
- The sugar restStanding five or six minutes after sifting sugar over lets it dissolve into the surface and produces the fine crackled crust characteristic of a good sponge finger. Do not skip it, and do not let them stand much longer or the batter will begin to slacken.
- Yield and storageTwo dozen fingers, joined flat side to flat side in pairs while cool. They stale fast; an airtight tin is not optional, and they are at their best within two days or used as a lining for a charlotte or trifle.
Sponge fingers of this kind are close kin to the French biscuit à la cuillère, literally "spoon biscuit" — a name that records the shaping method given here, before piping bags were common domestic equipment. The English name simply describes the shape, and the finished biscuits were less a cake in their own right than a building material: they line charlotte moulds, soak up wine and custard in trifles, and are handed round with ices and jellies. Rose-water is the older flavouring, long used in English confectionery and gradually displaced by vanilla in the course of the nineteenth century. Pairing them flat-to-flat and sealing them in a tin, as the recipe directs, would keep a stock of them on hand in a household that expected to produce a sweet at short notice.