Home › Bread and Bread Making › Nut Cakes
Nut Cakes
Meat from 1 lb. pecans 1 lb. powdered sugar 1/4 cup flour Whites 6 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Pound nut meat and mix with sugar and flour. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add first mixture and vanilla. Drop from tip of tablespoon (allowing one spoonful for each cake) on a tin sheet covered with buttered paper. Bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
This is a pecan meringue drop rather than a cake in any modern sense: nuts, sugar and stiff whites, with just enough flour to steady the batter. The whole thing turns on how you fold and how hot the oven is.
- Fold, do not stirThe nut-sugar-flour mixture is heavy and will knock the air out of the whites in seconds if beaten in. Add it in three or four additions, cutting down and through with a spatula, and stop while a few streaks remain.
- "Pound nut meat"A food processor does this in short pulses; run it continuously and the pecans turn to oily paste, which makes the cakes greasy and flat. Pulse to a coarse meal with some texture left, and add a spoonful of the measured sugar to absorb the oil.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven of the period is usually rendered as somewhere around 350F, though period usage varied. At the upper end these brown at the edges before the centres set; 325F for 20-25 minutes gives a crisp shell and a chewy middle.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century powdered sugar was granulated sugar crushed fine, not today's confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match; modern confectioners' sugar will work but gives a softer, more marshmallowy cake.
- Buttered paper on a tin sheetParchment on a heavy baking sheet, unbuttered. These meringues stick fiercely to bare metal and to foil, and butter under parchment only encourages spreading.
- QuantitiesA pound of sugar to a pound of nuts is very sweet by current taste. The proportion is structural in a meringue, so it cannot be cut much without affecting the set; reducing the sugar somewhat will let the nuts read more clearly, at the cost of a softer cake.
- Yield and keepingTablespoon drops from this quantity give roughly three and a half to four dozen cakes. Cool completely on the paper, then store airtight; in humid weather they go soft within a day and can be crisped for a few minutes in a low oven.