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Prune Almond Cake
Bake one-half Corn-starch Cake mixture in a drippingpan. Cut in two crosswise, spread between layers Prune Almond Filling, and cover top with White Mountain Cream. Prune Almond Filling. To one-half the recipe for White Mountain Cream add eight soft prunes stoned and cut in pieces, and one-fourth cup almonds blanched and cut in pieces. 1/2 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 cups flour
This is an assembly recipe: a sheet of plain cornstarch cake, split and filled, with a boiled meringue frosting doing double duty as both filling base and topping. The ingredient list printed at the end is a fragment of the cornstarch cake formula, not the whole cake.
- The ingredient list is incompleteButter, sugar, milk and flour alone will not make a cornstarch cake — the original recipe elsewhere in the book also calls for cornstarch, stiffly beaten egg whites and baking powder. Work from a full cornstarch or white-cake recipe rather than the four lines given here.
- White Mountain CreamThis is the book's boiled icing: a sugar syrup boiled and beaten into stiff egg white. No temperature is given on the page; if you use a thermometer, the soft-ball range of about 238-240F is the usual modern equivalent. Boiled too little the icing stays soupy, too far and it turns grainy and sets before you can spread it.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan; a modern 9x13 is a reasonable stand-in. The recipe gives no oven temperature or baking time; for a sheet this thin, a moderate oven of around 350F for 25-30 minutes is a modern approximation. The cake wants to be shallow enough to split cleanly in two.
- "Cut in two crosswise"Cut the baked sheet into two rectangles side by side, then stack them; this is not a horizontal split of a thin sheet. Trim the domed edges first so the layers sit flat.
- Soft prunesDried plums, softened by soaking in hot water or a brief simmer, then pitted. Drain and blot them thoroughly — wet fruit will thin the meringue filling and make it slide out from between the layers.
- Blanching almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let them stand a minute, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Slivered blanched almonds from a packet are a fair substitute; toast them lightly for more flavour.
- Timing the fillingFold the prunes and almonds into the icing at the last moment and spread immediately. Boiled icing stiffens as it cools and becomes unspreadable once it sets.
- YieldA modest two-layer cake; the size depends entirely on the pan, since none is specified. Best eaten the day it is made -- boiled icing crusts and weeps by the second day.
Cornstarch cake was a late nineteenth-century American fashion: replacing part of the wheat flour with cornstarch weakens the gluten and gives a notably fine, tender, white crumb, an effect often compared to that of modern cake flour, though the latter is a low-protein wheat flour rather than a starch-diluted one. Fannie Farmer's book is full of these modular constructions — one base cake, a shelf of fillings and frostings, and a dozen named cakes assembled from the combinations, which suited the school's teaching method. Prunes were cheap and shelf-stable, and turn up throughout the book in puddings, soufflés and fillings; pairing them with almonds is a natural one, since both plums and almonds belong to the same genus and the flavours have long been used together in European baking.