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Some Blanched Almonds
One ounce of Hundreds and Thousands (sweets).
Make the genoese and bake in a medium-sized cake-tin. When cold split and spread with a layer of the apricot marmalade, fix together and brush or spread the sides with the same roll in the sweets to form a band, arrange the almonds
This is a finishing recipe rather than a full one: the sponge and the apricot marmalade are assumed to be made from other entries in the book, and the text breaks off mid-sentence in the original. What survives is the assembly method for a jam-filled Genoese masked in sprinkles and almonds.
- The recipe is a fragmentThe ingredient list gives only the hundreds and thousands, and the final clause ("arrange the almonds") stops without saying where or how. Expect to supply the sponge quantities, the jam and the almonds yourself, and to decide the top decoration.
- Hundreds and thousandsThese are the tiny round nonpareil sprinkles, still sold under that name in Britain. One ounce is roughly two tablespoons, which is enough to band the sides of a small cake but not to coat it all over.
- GenoeseGenoese (génoise) is a whole-egg sponge: eggs and sugar whisked warm to a thick ribbon, flour folded in, then melted butter folded in last. It is firmer and less fragile than a fatless sponge, which is why it splits and handles well here.
- Medium-sized cake-tin and ovenMedium-sized cake-tin -- The book gives no oven heat or baking time at all, only the tin. A 7 to 8 inch round tin, lined and buttered, is a reasonable reading of 'medium-sized'; a genoise of that size is usually baked at a moderate heat (about 350F) for 25 to 30 minutes, until it springs back and the edge shrinks slightly from the tin, but that is modern practice supplied to fill the gap, not the recipe's instruction.
- Apricot marmaladeIn period usage this is apricot jam boiled down and sieved smooth, not citrus marmalade. Warm good apricot jam and push it through a sieve; it should be thick enough to hold the layers but loose enough to brush.
- The hinge: cool and level before coatingThe cake must be properly cold and the top trimmed flat before splitting, or the layers slide and the sides will not take an even band. Brush the sides with hot sieved jam, let it go tacky for a minute, then roll the cake on its edge through the sprinkles spread on paper.
- The almondsBlanched almonds means skinned: cover with boiling water for a minute, drain and slip the skins off. For the decoration, split them lengthwise or use flaked almonds, and toast them lightly to a pale gold for flavour and colour.
- YieldA cake of this size cuts into eight to ten slices. Assembled, it keeps a day or two under a cover, though the sprinkles begin to bleed colour into the jam.
Genoese was one of the workhorses of the late-Victorian and Edwardian pastry kitchen: a single tray of it, cut into squares, bars and rounds, masked with sieved apricot, and finished with sprinkles, nuts, coconut or fondant, produced the whole range of "fancies" that a good tea table was expected to show. That is why a book of this kind gives the sponge once and then lists variation after variation by their decoration alone, which is how a page comes to be titled for its almonds rather than its cake. Apricot jam, boiled and sieved, was the standard glue and glaze of the trade because it sets tacky, tastes clean under sugar, and takes a shine; pastry cooks still use it for the same reasons. Hundreds and thousands were a familiar cheap sugar confection in Britain by the later nineteenth century and a common domestic decoration, the sort of ready-bought flourish that let a home cook approximate a confectioner's window.