Home › Layer-Cakes › Almond Cream Cake
Almond Cream Cake
On beaten whites of ten eggs, sift one and a half goblets pulverized sugar, and a goblet flour through which has been stirred a heaping tea-spoon cream tartar; stir very gently and do not heat it; bake in jelly-pans. For cream, take a half pint sweet cream, yolks of three eggs, table-spoon pulverized sugar, tea-spoon corn starch; dissolve starch smoothly with a little milk, beat yolks and sugar together with this, boil the cream, and stir these ingredients in as for any cream-cake filling, only make a little thicker; blanch and chop fine a half pound almonds and stir into the cream. Put together like jelly cake while icing is soft, and stick in a half pound of almonds split in two. - Mrs. Paris Gibson, Minneapolis, Minn.
An angel-food batter baked in thin layers and filled with an almond pastry cream. The instructions assume you already know how to fold egg whites and cook a custard, so the two things worth pinning down are the measures and the handling of the whites.
- The gobletNineteenth-century American receipts used a goblet or tumbler as a rough cup measure, often reckoned at about 8 fl oz, though the vessels themselves varied. Read it as roughly 1 1/2 cups sugar to 1 cup flour, and sift the flour before measuring, since "pulverized" sugar and the soft flour of the period were probably lighter than what you will buy now.
- "Do not heat it"Almost certainly a printer's slip for "do not beat it." Fold the sifted sugar and flour into the whites with a spatula in as few strokes as will combine them; beating after the whites are up collapses the only leavening this cake has.
- Cream of tartarWith no soda present it is not a raising agent here but an acid to stabilise the foam and keep the crumb white. Modern practice is around 1/8 teaspoon per egg white, which for ten whites works out at about 1 1/4 teaspoons, so the recipe's heaping teaspoon is in range; much more will taste sour.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake the layers at 325-350F. Jelly-pans are 8 or 9 inch round tins about an inch deep, ungreased, and thin layers of this batter will be set in 12-18 minutes.
- The custardHalf a pint of cream, three yolks, a teaspoon of cornstarch. Temper the yolk-sugar-starch mixture with the hot cream, return it to the pan and cook to a boil, stirring, so the starch thickens and the raw-yolk taste goes. "A little thicker" means it should mound on the spoon, or it will run out from between the layers.
- AlmondsBlanch by covering shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, then slipping the skins. A half pound chopped into the cream and another half pound split for the top is a great deal of almond by current taste; half of each will do if you want less.
- Assembly"While icing is soft" means the split almonds go onto a freshly spread icing so they set in place. The recipe supplies no icing of its own, so you will need to choose one.
- YieldEnough batter for several thin layers. The filled cake will not keep more than a day; the custard means it belongs in the refrigerator.
Almond cream cake sits at the meeting point of two late nineteenth-century enthusiasms: the egg-white cake and the layer cake built up with a boiled custard filling rather than jam. Ten whites with no yolks and no butter is the angel-food formula in all but name, and books of this period often print an egg-white cake near a recipe that uses up yolks. The Dixie Cook Book, like other subscription cookbooks of the 1880s, carried signed contributions from women in many places, and the credits double as a social register; the Mrs. Paris Gibson credited here has been taken to be the wife of Paris Gibson, the Minneapolis flour miller who later became a Montana senator, though the identification is an inference rather than a documented one.