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Three Eggs (Two ounces of Vienna Flour)
Two ounces of Vienna Flour.
Half a teaspoonful of Baking Powder.
Grease and paper a flat baking-tin (as for Swiss roll). Cream the butter and sugar; add one egg, a little of the flour, and cocoa-nut. Then the other eggs, and the rest of flour and cocoa-nut. When well mixed spread this on the baking-sheet, not too thickly; put it in a moderate oven, and bake for about twenty minutes. When done sprinkle a sheet of paper with cocoa-nut; turn the pastry on to this; when cold cover it with transparent icing.
Cut it into fingers or fancy shapes. Do not let the icing get too firm before cutting. Decorate with coloured sugar or cocoa-nut. Chopped almonds can be used instead of cocoa-nut.
A thin coconut sheet cake, iced and cut into fingers. As printed the ingredient list is incomplete — the title carries the eggs and flour, and the butter, sugar and coconut quantities never appear — so this needs reconstructing before you can bake it.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for butter, sugar and cocoa-nut that the printed list omits; only 2 oz flour, ½ tsp baking powder and three eggs are given. Some sponges of this type run to roughly equal weights of butter, sugar and coconut, but the original does not say, and any figure here is a guess rather than a conversion.
- Vienna flourA finely milled, low-extraction wheat flour of Austrian type, prized in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens for its whiteness and softness. Plain cake flour is the nearest current equivalent; ordinary all-purpose flour will give a slightly tougher crumb.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. For a sheet spread thinly, check at 12-15 minutes rather than waiting the full twenty — a thin sponge dries out fast and the coconut will scorch at the edges.
- Cocoa-nutDesiccated (dried, unsweetened) shredded coconut, not fresh and not the sweetened flake sold for frosting cakes. Sweetened flake will make the finished fingers cloying, since the icing adds sugar of its own.
- The tin"As for Swiss roll" means a shallow rectangular tin of about 9 by 13 inches, greased and lined with parchment. Baking parchment replaces the greased paper of the original and releases more reliably.
- Turning outDo this while the sponge is still warm and flexible; a cooled thin sponge is more brittle. The coconut scattered on the paper stops it sticking and becomes the coating.
- Transparent icingThe recipe gives no formula; most likely a water or glacé icing — icing sugar slackened with a little hot water or lemon juice to a pourable gloss, without butter or egg white. Pour it over the cooled slab in one pass and let it set only to the tacky stage.
- CuttingThe instruction not to let the icing firm is the hinge of the recipe. Fully set glacé icing shatters and drags under the knife; cut with a long thin blade wiped between strokes while the surface is still just yielding.
- YieldA full Swiss roll tin cut into fingers gives roughly 24 to 30 pieces, depending on how narrowly you cut. They keep two or three days in a tin, though the icing softens.
Thin iced sponge slabs cut into fingers were a staple of the Edwardian tea table and of the pastry counter, where the aim was a large number of small, uniform, decorated pieces from one baking sheet — hence the instruction to cut before the icing sets hard. The recipe's reliance on desiccated coconut is hard to date precisely: grated and dried cocoa-nut appear in British recipes well before the 1880s, and commercial supply from Ceylon and the West Indies built up gradually rather than from any single moment, until it became a cheap way to give cakes and biscuits texture and perfume. "Vienna flour" belongs to the same broad moment: Austrian and Hungarian high milling made a considerable impression at the international exhibitions of the 1870s, and British cookery writers of the following decades name it specifically when they want a very white, very fine crumb. The recipe also permits chopped almonds in place of the coconut.