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Three Eggs (Ounces of Castor Sugar)
Three ounces of Castor Sugar.
Two and a half ounces of Flour.
Work the yolks of eggs and castor sugar well together with a wooden spoon. Beat the whites up stiffly and rub the flour through a sieve; then mix all together thoroughly but lightly. Put the mixture into a bag with a funnel at the end about the size of a shilling, and press out pieces of the paste into greased patty pans. Bake these in a moderate oven for about twenty minutes; when cold take two of these rounds and scoop out a small piece at the bottom of each, place a little whipped cream in each cavity, and stick the two cakes together: proceed in this way with all the cakes.
Then cover them over with chocolate icing, and when cold they are ready to serve. s2
A whisked sponge batter piped into shallow tins, sandwiched with cream and iced — the ingredient list is truncated in the original, but the method makes it recoverable. The title supplies the missing item: three eggs.
- The full ingredient listThree eggs, 3 oz (85 g) castor sugar, 2½ oz (70 g) flour, plus whipped cream and chocolate icing. Castor sugar is superfine sugar; ordinary granulated will not dissolve into the yolks as smoothly.
- The hinge: fold, then bake at onceThere is no baking powder here. The only lift comes from air beaten into the whites, so the flour and whites must be folded in with a light hand and the piping and baking done immediately. A batter left standing while you fill tins slowly will collapse and bake flat.
- Moderate oven350°F (175°C). Twenty minutes is long for small piped rounds; start checking at 10 to 12 minutes. They are done when springy and just colouring at the edge — overbaked, they dry out and will not take the cream.
- Patty pansShallow tartlet or bun tins, roughly 2 inches across. Grease and dust with flour, or use a silicone mould; a whisked sponge with no fat in the batter sticks readily.
- "The size of a shilling"A shilling measured a little under an inch across, so this is a wide plain piping tube, not a fine one.
- The creamWhip to soft-firm peaks and sweeten lightly if you wish — the original assumes plain cream against sweet icing. Fill and ice close to serving; the sponge softens quickly once cream is in it.
- Chocolate icingNot given here. A simple glacé icing of icing sugar, cocoa or melted chocolate and a little hot water sets firm enough to handle.
- YieldAbout 24 rounds, making 12 finished cakes. Best eaten the day they are made.
This belongs to the large family of whisked sponges — the same eggs-sugar-flour formula that produces Savoy biscuits, sponge fingers and the shells for a great many filled fancies. What marks it out is the equipment and the assembly rather than the ingredients: a forcing bag with a plain tube, patty pans, cream whipped by hand, and a chocolate icing applied only once the cakes are cold. Piped sponge work of this kind appears frequently in cookery books aimed at professional and large-household cooks, where a tea or supper table might carry several kinds of small iced cake made from a handful of interchangeable base mixtures. The truncated ingredient heading — the eggs stranded in the title, the sugar and flour in the body — appears to be an artefact of the ingredients being set above the method rather than as a list.