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Card Cakes
1/3 cup butter Jordan almonds 1 cup powdered sugar 1 tablespoon breakfast cocoa 2 eggs 2 tablespoons sugar 1 cup flour 1/4 teaspoon powdered cinnamon 1/3 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon vanilla Shredded cocoanut Cream the butter, add sugar, eggs well beaten, flour, and salt. Spread mixture on bottom of a buttered inverted dripping-pan, decorate with almonds blanched and cut in strips, and bake in slow oven. Cut in desired shape, using heart, spade, and diamond shaped cutters before removing from pan. To give variety, divide mixture in halves. To one-half add sugar, cocoa, cinnamon, and vanilla, then spread on pan and sprinkle with shredded cocoanut.
A thin shortbread-style sheet cookie baked on the back of a pan and cut into playing-card suits while still warm. The batter is stiff and the sheet is thin, so the cutting stage matters more than the mixing.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300 to 325F. Spread thin, the sheet will need something on the order of 20 to 25 minutes; it should be set and barely coloured, not browned, since the flavour here is butter and almond.
- Inverted dripping-panA dripping-pan is a shallow roasting pan; inverting it gives a flat, rimless surface to spread on and to cut against. The underside of a modern rimmed half-sheet pan does the same job, buttered as directed.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means finely granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match and creams properly with the butter.
- Breakfast cocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder, sold under that trade name in this period. Any natural or Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa works in the chocolate half.
- Jordan almondsHere this means the large, flat Spanish almond variety, not the candy-coated sweets of the same name. Use whole blanched almonds, sliced lengthwise into strips.
- CocoanutShredded dried coconut. Shredded coconut of the period was generally unsweetened; sweetened flake will make the chocolate half noticeably sweeter and may colour faster, so watch the surface.
- The hinge: cut before it coolsThe hinge: cut before it leaves the pan -- the recipe directs cutting the shapes before removing them from the pan, i.e. while the sheet is still warm and pliable rather than cold and brittle.
- Odd measuresThe 1/3 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla are as written; a generous 1/4 teaspoon of salt is close enough. The two-part version divides the plain batter and adds the extra 2 tablespoons sugar, cocoa, cinnamon and vanilla to one half only.