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Filling (Split the cake when cool)
Split the cake when cool and fill with the following: Soak 1 tablespoon gelatine in 1 cup plain cream. Heat it and pour over 2 egg yolks beaten up with 1/2 cup sugar. Stir few minutes over slow fire, flavor with vanilla, and when cool add 1/2 pint whipped cream. Just before it congeals spread between and on top of the cake.
This is a gelatine-set Bavarian cream used as both filling and frosting for a split layer cake. The whole thing turns on timing: it has to be spread in the narrow window when it has thickened but not yet firmly set.
- The hinge — catch it as it thickens"Just before it congeals" means the custard has cooled to the consistency of unbeaten egg white and is beginning to hold a line. Spread too early and it runs off the cake; wait too long and it sets into a block you cannot spread. Set the bowl over ice water and stir if you need to hurry it along, and have the cake split and ready first.
- Gelatine quantitiesOne tablespoon of granulated gelatine is roughly one modern 1/4-oz envelope. Softening it in cold cream rather than water is unusual but works; give it five minutes to swell before heating.
- "Plain cream"This means cream as it comes, unwhipped, as opposed to the whipped cream added later; it probably corresponds to what we would call light or single cream. Half-and-half or light cream is a reasonable match; heavy cream will make the custard base very rich but will not harm the set.
- Cooking the custard"Stir few minutes over slow fire" means a gentle heat until the mixture coats the spoon, around 170-180F. It must not boil or the yolks will curdle. A double boiler is more forgiving than direct heat, and straining the finished custard catches any threads.
- Half a pint of whipped creamRead this as half a pint of cream (1 cup) whipped, which gives about 2 cups whipped. Fold it in only after the custard is cool to the touch, or the cream will deflate.
- VanillaAdd the vanilla off the heat, once the custard is made — a teaspoon or so. Extract added to a hot pan loses much of its aroma.
- Yield and keepingEnough to fill and top a single 8- or 9-inch cake split into two layers. Because it is a cream custard with no further cooking, refrigerate the assembled cake and eat it within two days.
Fillings like this one belong to the long line of Bavarian creams — an egg-yolk custard lightened with whipped cream and held together with gelatine — which reached American home cooks in quantity once reliable granulated gelatine was sold by the box from the 1890s onward. Earlier, a cook wanting a set cream was more likely to be reducing calves' feet or clarifying isinglass, so a spoonful of powder from a packet represented a genuine shortcut, and cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s use it freely in cake fillings, chiffon pies and moulded desserts.