Home › Cold Desserts › Neapolitan Baskets
Neapolitan Baskets
Bake sponge cake in gem pans, cool, and remove centres. Fill with Cream Sauce I, flavoring half the sauce with chocolate. Melt chocolate, dilute with hot water, cool, and add Cream Sauce slowly to chocolate. Garnish with candied cherries and angelica and insert strips of angelica to represent handles.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: small sponge cakes hollowed out, filled with two colors of sweet cream filling, and dressed as baskets. Most of the work is in the components the original assumes you already have.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin tin with deep, rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease and flour it well, since sponge batter with no chemical leavening clings.
- Oven for the cakesThe recipe gives no oven direction, since the sponge cake is made elsewhere; small cups will generally take a moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F for roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops spring back. Baking a day ahead is said to make hollowing easier, as a slightly stale crumb tears less.
- Hollowing the centresCut a circle with a small paring knife about a quarter inch inside the rim and lift the plug out, leaving a floor of cake. Save the plugs as lids or crumbs.
- Which Cream SauceCookbooks of this kind often carry more than one sauce under a cream name. What is wanted here is a sweet dessert sauce thick enough to hold in a cavity, not a flour-thickened white sauce for vegetables and fish; check the reference in your own edition. If the Cream Sauce I you find is thin, reduce the liquid or fold in whipped cream so it will sit up.
- The chocolate step is the hingeAdd the cream sauce to the melted chocolate, never the reverse, and add it slowly. Chocolate dropped into a cool cream mixture seizes into gritty specks; building the mixture outward from the chocolate keeps it smooth. Diluting the melted chocolate with a little hot water first, as directed, is what makes this work.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stems, once a standard confectioner's green, are now specialty-shop goods. Candied citron cut in strips, or thin strips of green candied peel, stand in. A strip has to be pliable to arch as a handle; if it cracks, warm it briefly and press it into shape.
- Yield and holdingThe recipe gives no quantities; yield depends on the pan, so a standard twelve-cup tin gives twelve baskets. Fill shortly before serving and keep them cold, as the filling will soak into the cake walls if they stand.
In American cookbooks of this period, Neapolitan was shorthand for anything presented in contrasting colors or flavors side by side; it signals the visual scheme here, chocolate against white, rather than any dish from Naples. The basket itself belongs to a late-Victorian and Edwardian taste for made-up table pieces, where dessert was expected to look constructed, with handles, garlands and candied fruit standing in for florist's work. Candied angelica was the standard green in that palette, sold by confectioners alongside citron and cherries. The recipe is also a frugal one in the school's usual manner: it takes plain sponge cake and a pudding sauce already taught elsewhere in the volume and turns them into a company dessert without a new technique.