Tipsy Cake
INGREDIENTS for 1 large dish.-1 moulded sponge or Savoy cake, sufficient sweet wine or sherry to soak it, 6 tablespoonfuls of brandy, 2 oz. of sweet almonds, 1 pint of rich custard. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Procure a cake that is three or four days old-either sponge, Savoy, or rice answering for the purpose of a tipsy cake. Cut the bottom of the cake level, to make it stand firm in the dish; make a small hole in the centre, and pour in and over the cake TIPSY CAKE. sufficient sweet wine or sherry, mixed with the above proportion of brandy, to soak it nicely. When the cake is well soaked, blanch and cut the almonds into strips, stick them all over the cake, and pour TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE. round it a good custard, made by our recipe' allowing 5 eggs to the pint of milk. The cakes are sometimes crumbled and soaked, and a whipped cream heaped over them, the same as for trifles.
TIME. About 2 hours to soak the cake.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A stale cake soaked in fortified wine and flooded with custard — essentially a trifle built from one whole cake rather than crumbs. Almost all of the work is in the custard and in the patience of the soaking.
- Ignore the stray words"TIPSY CAKE." and "TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE." appear mid-sentence as artefacts of the printed page (headings or captions carried into the text). They are not instructions.
- The cake must be staleThree or four days old is not a suggestion. A fresh, moist sponge collapses into paste as soon as the wine hits it; a dry one absorbs and holds its shape. If your cake is fresh, split it and dry the pieces in a 250F oven until firm.
- How much wineThe original gives no figure, and it depends entirely on the cake. Reckon on 250-400ml (1 to 1 2/3 cups) of sweet sherry, madeira or marsala for a 20cm cake, plus the 6 tablespoons of brandy, added a little at a time and allowed to soak in before more goes on. Stop when the cake is saturated but not sitting in a pool.
- Imperial pintA pint here is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups. Five eggs to that quantity of milk gives a pouring custard that will thicken noticeably as it cools.
- The custard is the hingeStir it over gentle heat until it coats the back of a spoon, somewhere around 175-180F, and no further. Push much past that and the eggs will curdle, and no amount of beating brings it back. Strain it and cool it before pouring, or the heat will finish off the cake.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds — the phrase distinguishes them from bitter almonds, then sold for flavouring. Blanched whole almonds cut lengthways into spikes are what is wanted; flaked almonds will not stand up in the cake.
- Soaking timeThe book allows about 2 hours. Longer does no harm; overnight in the refrigerator, covered, suits a modern kitchen, with the custard poured round only shortly before serving.
- Yield and servingThe book specifies only "1 large dish"; a whole cake of this kind will stretch to roughly 8 to 10. Serve cold in wedges cut down through cake and custard together, with whipped cream if you follow the variation at the end.
Tipsy cake belongs to the family of English wine-soaked puddings that runs from the sixteenth-century "fool" and "trifle" through to the layered trifle of the present day, and the two dishes were never firmly separated — Mrs Beeton's own closing line, that the cake may instead be crumbled and heaped with whipped cream "the same as for trifles", admits as much. The name is straightforward: the cake is drunk. A Savoy cake, called for here as an alternative, was a light egg sponge baked in a tall decorated mould. The whole thing is a thrifty conceit of the Victorian household, a way of turning a stale cake into a company dessert.