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Sauce for Cherry-Nut Cake
Bring 1 cup of the canned cherry juice to boil with 2/3 cup sugar, then thicken with 1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in little cold cherry juice. Boil till thick, then cool. Just before serving, whip 2/3 cup cream, add the cherry syrup and spread on cake. Garnish with rubyettes. Serves 10.
A cornstarch-thickened cherry glaze folded into whipped cream, used as a frosting rather than a pourable sauce. The one thing that will ruin it is heat.
- Cool the syrup completelyThe thickened cherry juice must be at room temperature or colder before it meets the cream, or the cream will deflate and weep. Chill it in a shallow dish, covered, and stir once or twice to keep a skin from forming.
- Cherry juiceThis means the packing liquid from a can of red sour or sweet cherries, not modern cherry juice cocktail. A standard can will not usually give a full cup of syrup; top up with water if you are short.
- Sugar to tasteTwo-thirds cup of sugar suits tart, lightly sweetened juice. If your cherries come in heavy syrup, you may want to cut the sugar back or the frosting will be cloying.
- CornstarchSlake the tablespoon of cornstarch in two tablespoons of cold juice before adding it. "Boil till thick" means about a minute at a full bubble -- cornstarch needs to reach a boil to lose its raw taste, but prolonged boiling breaks the gel down again.
- RubyettesApparently a period term for small candied or maraschino-style cherries. Whole glac\o cherries or drained maraschinos are the direct substitute.
- Whipping the creamUse heavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks only, then fold the syrup in with a spatula rather than beating it in. Two-thirds cup of cream yields about 1 1/3 cups whipped -- enough to cover the top and sides of a single layer, not to fill a tall layer cake generously.
- Holding timeStabilized only by the cornstarch, this will begin to slump within a few hours. Frost the cake shortly before serving and keep it refrigerated.
Cream-and-fruit-syrup frostings like this one belong to an era when canned fruit was prized and cooks were taught to waste none of it: the juice left in the can becomes the sauce for the cake the cherries went into. Cornstarch was by then a well-established household thickener, cheap and reliable, and it let a cook turn thin syrup into something that would sit on a cake without soaking it. Brightly colored garnishes sold under catchy names -- rubyettes may be one -- suited a table meant to look up to date, and the pairing of cherries with nuts in the cake itself fits a broader fondness for studded, speckled layer cakes.