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Raisin Cream Filling
½ cup chopped raisins ¼ cup sugar ¼ cup water 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour Cook until thick. When cold, whip half a pint of thin cream sweetened and flavored to taste. Add to raisin mixture.
When cake is cold, put filling between layers and on top of cake.
A cooked raisin paste folded into sweetened whipped cream — simple, but two of its assumptions no longer hold: "thin cream" will not whip, and the raisin base must be genuinely cold before the two meet.
- Cool the base completelyWarm raisin paste will slacken the cream and the filling will run out from between the layers. Spread the cooked mixture in a shallow dish and chill it to refrigerator temperature before folding in the cream.
- "Thin cream" is the problem wordIn period usage thin or light cream ran roughly 18-20% butterfat; the recipe assumes it can be whipped, which such cream does only indifferently and will not do reliably in a modern kitchen. Use heavy or whipping cream at 35% or more.
- Half a pintOne cup of cream, which whips up to about two cups — enough to fill and top a single layer cake, not to frost the sides as well.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour from the mill that published the book. Ordinary all-purpose flour is a direct substitute; here it is doing nothing but thickening, so the choice is immaterial.
- Cooking the baseWhisk the flour into the water and sugar before heating so it does not lump, then cook over medium heat, stirring, until it is thick enough to mound on the spoon — three to five minutes after it comes to a simmer. Cook the flour out or the filling tastes pasty.
- Chop the raisins fineCoarse pieces stay chewy and tear the crumb when you spread the filling. A few pulses in a food processor with a spoonful of the sugar keeps them from clumping.
- Assemble late, serve soonA flour-stabilised whipped cream holds better than plain cream but still weeps within a day. Fill the cake within a few hours of serving and keep it refrigerated.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given away or sold cheaply alongside its flour — the recipes were largely solicited from customers, which is why so many of them are as brief as this one, written by a cook for cooks who already knew the method. The raisin filling belongs to an era when dried fruit was the reliable year-round sweet in a Canadian pantry: shelf-stable, cheap, and available in a January when nothing fresh was. Flour-thickened fruit pastes of this kind turn up throughout the period as layer-cake fillings, doing the work now handled by jam or pastry cream, and the trick of folding one into whipped cream stretched an expensive ingredient across a whole cake.