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Small Cream Cakes
Drop the butter sponge cake mixture on greased baking pans. Let the cakes be about the size of silver dollars. They will run out thin. Dredge sugar on top with a dredger Bake light. Spread pastry cream between two placed together.
A sandwich cookie built from cake batter rather than dough, and the whole thing hinges on baking the drops pale and pulling them before the edges color.
- "Bake light"These are thin drops of sponge batter and cook quickly. No temperature or time is given; a hot oven and a few minutes' bake, watching closely and taking them out while the tops are barely blond and the edges only just set, follows the instruction. Browning is what the direction is warning against.
- Silver dollar sizeA silver dollar is about 1 1/2 inches across, so a rounded teaspoon of batter per cake. The book warns they run out thin, which they do -- leave a good two inches between drops or they will merge into a sheet.
- DredgerA dredger is a lidded shaker with a perforated top, the period tool for dusting flour or sugar. Any fine-mesh sieve or sugar shaker gives the same even veil; a spoonful tipped on will clump and weep.
- Greased pansButter alone on a thin cake batter is unreliable at this size. Parchment on a heavy sheet lifts them cleanly, and a heavy sheet keeps the bottoms from taking color before the tops set.
- Butter sponge cake mixtureThe wording points to a base batter given elsewhere in the book rather than to a pound cake. If you are substituting a modern recipe, choose a genoise or hot-milk sponge; a stiff butter cake batter will not run out thin as the instruction expects.
- Pastry creamSpread it cold and thick. A warm or loose crme ptissire soaks straight into the sponge and the pairs slump. Filled cakes are best eaten the same day, and because the filling is an egg custard they belong in the refrigerator until served.
- YieldNot given. It depends entirely on how much of the butter sponge batter you make; at silver-dollar size each pair takes two drops.
The recipe assumes you already have both a butter sponge batter and a pot of pastry cream standing by, building a finished item out of base preparations given elsewhere. Dropped sponge batter has a long ancestry in the biscuit a la cuillere and its relatives. The silver dollar as a unit of measure is worth noticing: it was a coin an American reader in this period handled routinely and could picture instantly, roughly an inch and a half across.