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Almond Charlotte
Three-fourths cup of fine sugar, one-fourth cup of butter, whites of three eggs, one cup of flour, one level teaspoon baking powder, one-fourth cup of milk; flavor with almond and bake delicately in a square layer tin. Whip one pint of cream, sweetened and slightly flavored with almond, until very stiff. Pile thick on the cake and sprinkle thick with almonds, blanched and cut into shreds.- Mrs Robert Russell.
A one-layer white cake under a mountain of almond whipped cream. The original assumes you know the standard butter-cake method, so the mixing order is left to you.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, then fold in the whites beaten stiff. The whites are the only lift beyond the teaspoon of baking powder, so fold rather than stir.
- "Fine sugar"Probably not confectioners' sugar but the finer-grained white sugar sold as superfine or caster, which creams smoothly into a small quantity of butter. Ordinary granulated works if you cream it a minute longer.
- "Bake delicately"No temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, around 350F in modern terms, and pull it as soon as the centre springs back — roughly 20 to 25 minutes. "Delicately" here most likely means pale: a browned crust spoils the point of a white cake under white cream.
- The panSquare layer tins of the period were shallow and ran to roughly 8 or 9 inches. An 8-inch square pan gives a layer about an inch thick; a 9-inch pan gives something thinner and drier.
- Almond flavoringA quarter teaspoon of almond extract in the cake and a scant quarter teaspoon in the cream is enough — "slightly flavored" is the instruction and almond extract is far stronger than vanilla. Modern extract is benzaldehyde-based and safe; do not substitute bitter almond oil.
- A pint of creamTwo cups of heavy cream whipped to "very stiff" yields about a quart of topping, deliberately out of proportion to a single thin layer. Sweeten with two to three tablespoons of sugar and stop the moment it holds a sharp peak, as over-whipped cream will weep on the cake.
- Blanching the almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let stand a minute, and the skins slip off between your fingers. Dry them well before shredding with a knife, or toast them lightly for more flavour than the original gets.
- Assembly and yieldThe cake must be completely cold or the cream will slump. Cut into nine squares; it will not hold more than a few hours in the refrigerator before the cream begins to soften the crumb.
Strictly speaking a charlotte is a molded dessert — bread, sponge fingers or cake lining a dish around a filling of fruit or cream, and in the case of a charlotte russe, ladyfingers around Bavarian cream. By the end of the nineteenth century American home cooks had loosened the word considerably, and "charlotte" came to mean almost any assembly of cake and sweetened whipped cream, sometimes molded and often, as here, simply piled. The attribution to a named contributor, Mrs Robert Russell, indicates a reader- or community-contributed collection and no more. The dessert also reflects the period's fondness for almond flavouring in white cakes, which paired the pale crumb produced by egg whites alone with an aroma that suggested something more elaborate than the short ingredient list would imply.