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Apple Creamcake
For 4 or 5 cakes for a hotel supper take: 3 pounds of flour--12 cupfuls. 2 pounds of butter or lard--4 cupfuls. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt. 1 quart of ice water. More flour to dust with.
Rub the butter into the flour dry between the hands. Use salt only when lard is employed for shortening. Make a hollow, pour in the water, mix up soft, and roll out on the table.
It makes the cake flaky and part in layers to roll it and fold it a few times like pie paste.
Roll out as thick as biscuit at last and bake on jelly cake pans. Split them open, spread apple cream thickly between and powdered sugar on top.
This is a rough-puff pastry built in hotel quantity and baked as flat layer cakes rather than as a pie or a tart. The original assumes you already have the book's apple cream made and cooling.
- Scale it downThree pounds of flour yields four or five full-size layer cakes for a supper table. A quarter of the recipe — 12 oz flour, 8 oz butter, about 1 cup ice water — gives one split cake serving six to eight.
- Weigh the flourThe equation of 3 pounds to 12 cupfuls means roughly 4 oz per cup, lighter than a modern packed cup of all-purpose. Go by the weight, 1,360 g, and ignore the cup count.
- Why salt only with lardNineteenth-century butter was sold salted, sometimes heavily so. The instruction is a correction for seasoning, not chemistry. With modern unsalted butter, use the 2 teaspoons of salt regardless of which fat you choose.
- Hydration is high on purposeA quart of water to 3 pounds of flour is roughly 70 percent hydration — much wetter than pie dough. That is what makes a soft dough you can roll and fold like puff paste rather than a short crumb. Keep the water genuinely ice cold and the butter in visible flakes.
- "Jelly cake pans"Shallow round tins, 8 to 9 inches across with a low rim — what we now call layer cake pans. Roll the dough about 1/2 inch thick, the thickness of a rolled biscuit, and press it in to the edges.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the book assumes a working bakeshop. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, suits laminated dough, so that the water in the butter turns to steam before the layers set; roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is dry and pale gold.
- Apple creamThe filling is a separate recipe elsewhere in the same book, presumably a thick sweetened apple purée or marmalade. Whatever form it takes, it needs to be cold and stiff before it goes between the split layers or it will soak them.
- SplittingSplit while barely warm, not hot, using a long serrated knife with the top layer set back in place until the filling goes in. Powdered sugar on top just before serving; it dissolves on standing.
Cakes of this sort sit on the line between pastry and cake. A plain flaky base, split and filled, could be finished with whatever cream the pastry cook had to hand. Jelly cake pans take their name from the jelly-layered cakes baked in them, and make the shallow, easily split round that the format needs. This recipe, pitched at hotel quantity, gives its amounts in pounds and quarts and leaves out oven temperature altogether.