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Fancy Almond Cakes
Ingredients.
Half a pound of Sweet Almonds (ground).
Half an ounce of Castor Sugar.
Two or three Whites of Eggs.
Few drops of Vanilla Essence and Orange Flower Water. Mix the almonds and sugar together, add flavouring and enough beaten egg to form a stiffish paste. Force out on to rice-paper, decorate with pieces of cherry and angelica-bake in moderately hot oven until crisp. Cool on sieve.
A macaroon-type almond paste piped onto rice paper. The recipe is workable as written, but the sugar quantity is almost certainly a printer's error and needs a decision before you start.
- The sugar looks wrongHalf an ounce of sugar to half a pound of ground almonds gives a paste that is barely sweet and will not gloss the way an almond cake should. Comparable macaroon recipes of the period generally use sugar equal to or greater than the weight of the almonds, so a misprint is likely, though the intended figure cannot be recovered with certainty. Treat the printed figure with suspicion rather than as a deliberately austere formula.
- Ground sweet almondsThis is ordinary blanched almond meal — "sweet" only distinguishes it from bitter almonds. Modern ready-ground almonds are drier than freshly pounded ones, so you may need the third egg white.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Granulated will not dissolve into the paste in the time available and leaves a gritty crumb.
- Orange flower waterSold with baking extracts or in Middle Eastern groceries. It is potent: a few drops means a few drops, not a teaspoon, or the cakes taste of soap.
- Oven"moderately hot" in period usage is roughly 375-400F, a step above a plain moderate oven. Expect somewhere around 12-18 minutes depending on the size piped; the surface should be dry and pale gold, the inside still slightly soft.
- Rice paperEdible rice paper (wafer paper), not the translucent rice sheets sold for spring rolls. It is baked with the cakes and eaten; trim round each one when cool. Baking parchment works if you cannot get it, though the bases will be softer.
- Forcing outA piping bag with a plain or star tube. The paste should just hold a shape — if it spreads flat on the paper, work in more ground almonds rather than flour.
- CoolingCooling on a sieve is simply a wire rack; air underneath keeps the bases crisp. Store airtight once fully cold, as they soften quickly in a humid kitchen.
- YieldAbout 20–24 small cakes from this quantity.
Almond paste piped onto rice paper is the standard British confectioner's macaroon of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the same family as the ratafia and the Italian amaretto, all built on the fact that ground almonds and egg white need no flour and no leavening to hold a shape. Vanilla is here paired with orange flower water, a flavouring long used in English cookery and one that had largely fallen out of domestic use by the mid-twentieth century. Glacé cherry and angelica, the green candied stem of Angelica archangelica, were the conventional decorative pair of the era, colourful enough to justify the word "fancy" in the title. Rice paper solved a practical problem in a period before reliable non-stick surfaces: the sticky paste released cleanly because the paper simply became part of the cake.