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For the Filling
For the filling, make a Frozen Custard, and stand it away until ready to serve.
When the cake is cold and you are ready to serve, cut off the top and take out the centre, leaving a bottom and wall about one inch thick. Fill this space with the frozen custard, put the top back, if it is high in the centre cut the elevation off. Heap strawberries over the top, dust thickly with powdered sugar, and pour around a syrup made by boiling one pound of sugar and a half pint of water for ten minutes. Syrup should be made early and stood away to cool.
This is the assembly half of an iced cake: a plain sponge or pound cake hollowed out and packed with frozen custard at the last minute. The instructions assume you already have the cake and the custard from elsewhere in the book.
- Work fast, and work coldThe hinge is temperature. Hollow the cake and have the syrup, berries and sugar ready before the custard leaves the freezer, then fill, cap and serve within a few minutes. Chilling the hollowed cake shell first buys a little time.
- "Frozen custard"An egg-yolk custard cooked to the nappe stage, cooled, then churned and hardened — what a modern kitchen calls French-style ice cream. Good commercial vanilla ice cream, slightly softened so it packs without cracking the cake wall, does the same job.
- The syrup measurementsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; half a pint of water is one cup. That is a heavy syrup to begin with, and ten minutes at a boil reduces it further — expect something near thread stage that will thicken again as it cools. If it sets too stiff, thin it with a spoonful of hot water.
- Make the syrup firstThe original is right to insist on this. Warm syrup poured around frozen custard melts the whole construction; it needs to be fully cold, and it keeps for days covered in the refrigerator.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, which is not identical to what we sell as confectioners' sugar. Confectioners' sugar is the easier choice here, since it clings to damp berries instead of dissolving into them.
- Cutting the shellThe original asks for a bottom and wall about an inch thick. Cut the lid off first, then trace a circle an inch inside the rim with a paring knife and lift the crumb out with a spoon. If the replaced top is high in the centre, cut the elevation off as the recipe directs so the surface is flat for the berries.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe does not give the cake's size; a cake of 8 to 9 inches treated this way would serve roughly eight to ten. Cut it with a long knife dipped in hot water and wiped between slices, and plate each wedge in a shallow pool of the syrup.
Hollowing a cake and filling it with ice cream was a familiar trick of late nineteenth-century American cookery; it gave a cook with an ice-cream freezer and a supply of ice a showpiece dessert that needed no oven on the day it was served. The cake and the custard are both made in advance, and the last act is assembly rather than cooking. A clear boiled sugar syrup of this kind was a common finish for iced dishes.