Christmas Cakes
Bake Newport Pound Cake in golden-rod pans, cut in fourths crosswise, spread with Ice Cream Frosting, and gar. nish with green leaves, made from ornamental frosting, and round red candies to imitate berries.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a batter: it assumes you have already turned to the pound cake and frosting entries elsewhere in the book. What it really specifies is a shape, a coating and a holly decoration.
- Golden-rod pansThe book does not describe them, but cutting the baked cake "in fourths crosswise" implies a longish pan yielding a slim bar. A small loaf tin, or a square pan cut into fingers, will give roughly the same shape.
- Baking the pound cakeNo oven heat or time is given here; it is carried by the separate pound cake entry. As a rich butter cake, a modern moderate oven of about 325-350F suits it, and a shallow narrow pan will bake faster than a full loaf, so check early.
- Cut cold, frost coldPound cake crumbs badly when warm. Cool the bars completely, then trim the edges square with a serrated knife before frosting so the coating sits cleanly.
- Ice Cream FrostingDespite the name it is a sugar frosting, not a dairy or frozen one; consult the book's own Ice Cream Frosting entry for the method and proportions. Boiled sugar frostings of this type stiffen as they cool, so spread quickly.
- Ornamental frosting for the leavesThis is royal icing, made stiff with uncooked egg white so it holds a piped shape and dries hard. If it is to be eaten by children, the very old or anyone pregnant, use pasteurized whites or meringue powder, since the icing is never heated.
- Piping the hollyTint a small portion green and pipe leaf shapes onto parchment first; let them dry hard for several hours, then lift and set them on the frosted cake with a dot of icing. Piping directly onto soft frosting blurs the outline.
- The red candiesThe recipe asks only for small round red candies. Red cinnamon drops (red hots, cinnamon imperials) are one plausible period choice; any small round red candy reads as a holly berry.
- YieldThe original gives none. One pan cut in fourths gives four bars; bake several pans if more are wanted.
Christmas Cakes here is less a dish than a decorating scheme, and it shows how the Boston Cooking-School method worked: a set of cross-referenced base recipes -- a pound cake, a boiled frosting, an ornamental frosting -- recombined into occasion pieces. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, was built on this idea of standardized components referred to by name across the book. Holly, with green leaves and red berries, was a common Christmas motif in late Victorian Britain and America, and confectioners imitated it in icing. A cheap, uniformly round red candy was an easy stand-in for a berry. "Newport" in the pound cake's name is the sort of resort-town label found in American cookbooks of the era, and appears to be a nod to fashionable Rhode Island rather than evidence of local origin.