Home › Cake Fillings And Frostings › Cocoanut Cakes II
Cocoanut Cakes II
1 lb. fresh grated cocoanut Whites 2 eggs ¾ lb. sugar Cook, shape, and bake same as Cocoanut Cakes I.
Stuffed Dates I Make a cut the entire length of dates and remove stones. Fill cavities with castanea nuts, English walnuts, or blanched almonds, and shape in original form. Roll in granulated sugar. Pile in rows on a small plate covered with a doily. If castanea nuts are used, with a sharp knife cut off the brown skin which lies next to shell.
A two-ingredient macaroon that depends entirely on how far you cook the meringue before shaping. The companion recipe it points back to is not reproduced here, so the method below reflects the standard practice of the period.
- The sugar quantityThe figure reads as 3/4 lb. sugar, which is about 1 2/3 cups granulated.
- Cook, then shape, then bakeThe companion recipe is not reproduced on this page. Recipes of this type generally direct that coconut, sugar and slightly beaten whites be stirred in a bowl set over hot water until the mass thickens and holds together, then shaped into small pyramids on buttered paper and baked. Skipping the cooking step gives a mixture that slumps on the sheet.
- OvenNo baking direction appears on this page; it is deferred to the companion recipe. Recipes of this type call for a slow oven, roughly 300F in modern terms, baked until the pyramids are set and only delicately colored. Coconut and sugar both scorch quickly, so a hotter oven browns the tips before the centers dry.
- Fresh grated cocoanutA pound of freshly grated coconut is roughly 5 cups, moist and unsweetened. Modern unsweetened desiccated coconut works but is much drier; moisten it with a little milk or water and let it stand before mixing, or the cakes will be sandy. Sweetened flaked coconut makes them cloying.
- Egg whitesTwo whites is a small amount of binder for a pound of coconut. Use large eggs and add the second white gradually, stopping when the mass just coheres when pressed.
- YieldAbout two dozen small pyramids. They keep several days in a tin and stale quickly in the open air.
- On the stuffed datesCastanea nuts are chestnuts; the brown skin under the shell is the pellicle, which is bitter and must be pared away. The dates are stuffed raw and rolled in granulated sugar, no cooking involved.
Coconut macaroons of this kind became common in American cookbooks once dried and shredded coconut arrived in quantity in the later nineteenth century, though this version still assumes a cook cracking and grating a whole nut. The Boston Cooking-School book gives two numbered formulas for cocoanut cakes, the second directing the cook to shape and bake it as the first. The stuffed dates belong to the confectionery and bonbon pages, where dates, figs and prunes were filled with nuts and rolled in sugar for the after-dinner plate, the doily being part of the presentation rather than an afterthought.