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Card Cakes
1/3 cup butter. 1 cup powdered sugar. 2 eggs. 1 cup flour. 1/3 teaspoon salt. Jordan almonds 1 tablespoon breakfast cocoa 2 tablespoons sugar ¼ teaspoon powdered cinnamon ¼ teaspoon vanilla Shredded cocoanut Cream the butter, add sugar, eggs well beaten, flour, and salt. Spread mixture on bottom of a buttered inverted . Spread mixture on bottom of a buttered inverted drippingpan, decorate with almonds blanched and cut in strips, and bake in slow oven. Cut in desired shape, using heart, spade, and diamond shaped cutters before removing from pan. To give variety, divide mixture in halves. To one-half add sugar , cocoa, cinnamon, and vanilla, then spread on pan and sprinkle with shredded cocoanut.
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A thin, shortbread-like sheet cake baked flat and cut into playing-card suits while still warm. The proportions of the base batter are not fully legible in this text, so treat the method rather than the measurements as the usable part.
- Cut while warmCut in the pan -- the recipe stamps the shapes before the sheet is lifted out. It does not specify warm, but a thin butter cake cuts more cleanly before it hardens; once cold the cutters tend to crumble the edges.
- "Slow oven"Usually glossed as about 300 to 325F. A thin sheet of rich dough browns at the edges long before the centre is done, so low heat and a watchful eye are the point; the recipe gives no baking time, so judge by colour.
- The inverted dripping-panA dripping pan was the shallow rectangular pan set beneath roasting meat to catch the fat; turning it over gave a flat, rimless surface to spread batter on and to run a cutter across. A modern rimless cookie sheet or an upturned half-sheet pan does the same job.
- Jordan almondsHere this means plain shelled sweet almonds of the large flat Spanish type, not the sugar-shelled confection sold under that name today. Blanch by covering with boiling water for a minute, then slip the skins and cut lengthwise into strips.
- Breakfast cocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder with some of the fat left in, as sold for drinking. Any natural unsweetened cocoa works; Dutch-process gives a darker colour and a milder flavour.
- CocoanutShredded coconut was sold both moist and sweetened and as dry desiccated, so either could be meant. Sweetened shredded coconut is a reasonable choice; unsweetened desiccated will taste drier against this batter.
- The two-tone versionThe batter is divided, and only one half is flavoured with cocoa, cinnamon and vanilla, then finished with coconut. Spread the two halves side by side on the same pan so both bake in the same time.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts of butter, eggs, flour and salt for the plain base are not given in this text. The sugar for the cocoa half appears in the ingredient list as 2 tablespoons, though the method line leaves the figure out. Work from a plain butter-cookie sheet dough you trust rather than guessing at the rest.
Card cakes belong to the era when whist, euchre and later bridge structured middle-class evening entertaining, and the hostess was expected to echo the game in the refreshments -- hence cutters for hearts, spades and diamonds, and the almond strips laid on to mark the pips. Cookery books of the period carried a long run of these small stamped and sheet cakes in their cookie chapters, all built on the same principle: one rich butter batter spread thin, baked on the flat back of a pan, and divided or flavoured to give the appearance of several different sweets from a single mixing. Dividing a batter and darkening half with cocoa was a standard economy of the period, giving a two-colour plate without a second creaming.