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Kossuth Cakes
Make sponge drops large and thick, hollow out the bottoms, put in whipped cream or pastry cream, place two together and with a fork dip them in melted sweet chocolate or chocolate icing and set on tins to dry. A specialty of Baltimore confectioners. Sell at about a dollar a dozen.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have the book's sponge drop batter and a filling to hand. The points below fill in what a 1900 pastry cook would have known without being told.
- Sponge dropsEssentially a ladyfinger-type batter — eggs whipped with sugar, folded into flour, dropped or piped onto paper. For Kossuth cakes make domes about 2 inches across rather than fingers. The book gives no oven setting here; the modern equivalent is a moderate oven (about 350F) until springy and just coloured, roughly 10-14 minutes.
- "Large and thick"The point is a dome with enough crumb to excavate. Thin drops collapse when you hollow them and again when the chocolate goes on.
- Hollowing outDo it with the tip of a small knife or a melon baller once the drops are completely cold, leaving a shell about a quarter-inch thick. Warm sponge tears.
- Pastry creamCrème pâtissière — milk, sugar, egg yolks, flour or cornstarch, cooked to a boil and chilled. It holds far better than whipped cream if the cakes are to sit for more than a couple of hours.
- Sweet chocolateIn this period "sweet chocolate" meant a sweetened dark eating chocolate, not milk chocolate and not unsweetened baking chocolate. Temper it, or use a coating chocolate, if you want the shell to set glossy and firm rather than dull and soft.
- DippingA fork works, but the cakes are fragile once filled; chill the assembled pairs for 20 minutes first so the filling is firm and the sponge stiff. Cold cakes also set the chocolate quickly.
- "Set on tins to dry"Sheet pans lined with parchment. The chocolate is setting, not drying — keep them at cool room temperature, around 65F, since a refrigerator will dull tempered chocolate.
- StorageWith whipped cream inside these are a same-day item and belong in the refrigerator. Pastry cream buys you a day at most.
- YieldThe book's sponge drop batter is not given here; a typical four-egg sponge batter would yield roughly two dozen domes, so about a dozen finished cakes — one to two per person as a dessert.
Kossuth cakes are genuinely Baltimore's, and the name points to Lajos Kossuth, the exiled leader of the 1848-49 Hungarian revolution, who toured the United States in 1851-52 to considerable public enthusiasm and was received in Baltimore among other cities. Confectioners of the period are often said to have named sweets after visiting celebrities, and this one stuck: Baltimore shops were still selling chocolate-dipped cream-filled sponge cakes under the name well into the twentieth century, and a national trade manual like this one records it as a local specialty rather than a general formula. The price note — a dollar a dozen — is a retail selling price; The American Pastry Cook was written for men running commercial shops, and such a figure told a reader more than a paragraph of description would. That dollar was steep for 1900, marking these as a luxury counter item rather than everyday bakery stock.