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Macaroon Cake
Often incorrectly called macaroni cake. A specialty at some of the fine bakeries.
It is a sheet of cake with macaroon paste baked on top and fruit jelly in spots. For the cake take 1 pound of sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 6 eggs. 1 small cupful of milk. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. Flour to roll out--about 2 pounds. Warm the butter and sugar and stir them together to a cream, add the eggs two at a time, then the milk, then the powder and most of the flour. Work the dough on the table by pressing out and folding it till it can be rolled out to a sheet. Roll it thin as if for cookies, cut to the size of your baking pans, roll up the piece of dough on the rolling-pin and unroll it on the pan, previously well greased. Bake very light colored and not quite done, because it has to be cooked again.
This is a rolled cookie-style sheet rather than a batter cake, and it is deliberately underbaked the first time. Read it as the base layer of a two-stage bake.
- The hinge: bake it pale and shortThe sheet goes back into the oven once the macaroon paste is on, so the first bake only sets the dough. The recipe gives no temperature or time; use a moderate oven and check early, pulling it when it is dry to the touch and barely colored at the edges.
- Flour "to roll out"Two pounds against one pound of sugar and half a pound of butter is a stiff, cookie-like dough. Flour absorption varies, so hold back the last few ounces and stop when the dough is firm enough to roll without sticking.
- A small cupful of milkGenuinely imprecise. Treat it as 6 fl oz and adjust: the dough should come together as a mass you can press and fold, not a pourable batter.
- Warming the butter and sugarThis means softened to the point of being nearly fluid, not melted. The mixture will not aerate like a modern creamed butter cake, which is correct here; note that there is only one teaspoonful of baking powder to about two pounds of flour, so little rise is expected in any case.
- Macaroon pasteThe book assumes you know it: almond paste loosened with egg white and a little sugar until pipeable through a plain or star tube. Store-bought almond paste works; marzipan is too sweet and too firm.
- The jelly spotsThe recipe says only that the fruit jelly sits "in spots" alongside the macaroon paste on top; it does not describe the arrangement or name a fruit. Warm the jelly and stir it smooth so it spreads rather than sits in lumps.
- The second bakeReturn it to the oven until the macaroon topping is set and lightly browned. Cut into bars or squares while still warm, which is easier than cutting a thin sheet cold.
- YieldEnough dough for two half-sheet pans rolled cookie-thin, or one full sheet, giving 24-36 pieces depending on how you cut.
This belongs to the American bakeshop tradition rather than the home kitchen, which is why the author opens by correcting the name "macaroni cake" as an incorrect one for the cake, and notes it as a specialty of the finer bakeries. The form itself is a thin sweet pastry base, piped almond paste, jam in the gaps. Almond paste was one of the expensive staples of a professional bakeshop, which explains why a cake built on it appeared at fine bakeries rather than in the average household's repertoire.