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Layer Fruit Cake
Sheets of pound cake mixture baked in jelly cake pans; minced raisins, citron, almonds and currants mixed with icing and spread between.
A two-line formula of the kind pastry manuals gave to men who already knew the base recipes; everything hinges on baking the pound batter thin enough to layer without turning leaden.
- "Sheets" in jelly cake pansJelly cake pans are shallow round tins, generally 8 or 9 inches across with sides about an inch high — the ancestors of the modern round layer pan. The recipe gives no oven setting or time; batter spread thin in such a pan bakes far more quickly than the same mixture in a loaf.
- Pound cake mixtureThe classic base is equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, creamed and beaten by hand; older versions carry no chemical leavening, though period recipes vary. A pound of each would make a large quantity of batter — enough, roughly, for several 9-inch sheets.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks and sliced thin, was a standard fruit-cake ingredient and is now a specialty item around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel stands in without changing the character much.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red currants. Rinse and dry them if they are dusty, and toss the whole minced fruit mixture with a spoonful of the cake flour so it does not sink through the icing.
- Which icingThe recipe does not say which. A stiff icing will hold the fruit in suspension — either a boiled white icing or a confectioners' icing beaten thick with egg white; a thin glacé icing would run out at the edges under the weight of the layers.
- Mincing the fruitChop the raisins, citron and almonds fine. Large pieces make the layers slide apart when the cake is cut, and the filling should read as a mortar rather than as studded fruit.
- Assembly and yieldTrim the sheets level and stack them with the filling between. The recipe gives no number of layers or yield; a stacked 9-inch cake of three sheets would cut into roughly a dozen or so slices.
Layer cakes built in shallow tins spread through American baking in the second half of the nineteenth century, as cheap stamped tinware and more reliable ranges made it practical to bake thin sheets quickly. The formula is a shortcut of sorts, presupposing that pound cake and icing are already to hand, so that the cake costs little but the assembly. The fruit and nuts named here — raisins, citron, currants and almonds — are the familiar imported group of the American fruit cake, all shelf-stable goods.