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Ice-Cream Cake (Make good sponge-cake bake)
Make good sponge-cake, bake half an inch thick in jelly-pans, and let them get perfectly cold; take a pint thickest sweet cream, beat until it looks like ice-cream, make very sweet, and flavor with vanilla; blanch and chop a pound almonds, stir into cream, and put very thick between each layer. This is the queen of all cakes. -Miss Mattie Fullington.
A whipped-cream and almond layer cake from the era before refrigeration made such things routine; the whole thing hinges on cream cold enough and rich enough to hold a stiff whip.
- "Thickest sweet cream"This means the richest unsoured cream available — modern heavy or whipping cream at 36% fat or above. "Sweet" here is the opposite of soured, not a reference to sugar; the sugar comes later in the same sentence.
- Whipping it "like ice-cream"Beat the pint to stiff peaks, with cream, bowl and beaters thoroughly chilled. A pint of cream whips to roughly a quart. The recipe does not say how many layers to bake, only to put the cream "very thick between each layer."
- How sweet is "very sweet"No quantity is given. Three to four tablespoons of sugar per pint of cream reads as very sweet to a modern palate; add it with a teaspoon or two of vanilla once the cream has begun to thicken.
- Jelly-pansShallow round tins, 8 or 9 inches across; modern layer-cake pans work. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time. Sponge batter spread half an inch thick bakes fast, so a moderately hot oven — around 375F in modern terms — and a short bake of roughly 10 to 12 minutes, until the top springs back, is a plausible equivalent.
- A pound of almondsThat is a great deal — about 3 cups chopped — and it is meant to be. To blanch, pour boiling water over shelled almonds, let stand a minute, then slip the skins off and dry the nuts well before chopping, or they will weep into the cream.
- Assemble cold, serve soonBoth cake and cream must be fully cold or the filling slumps. Unstabilized whipped cream begins to weep within a few hours, so fill the cake near serving time and keep it refrigerated; it will not survive a day on the sideboard.
- YieldThe recipe does not specify a number of layers or a yield; three or four thin layers would give a cake serving roughly 10 to 12. Cut with a long thin knife wiped between slices.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks often used "ice-cream cake" for a cake filled with sweetened whipped cream rather than one containing frozen custard; the name seems to rest on the filling's resemblance to ice cream, which in this period was a laborious, hand-cranked luxury for most households rather than an everyday sweet. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) belongs to the family of community compilations connected to Buckeye Cookery — both were edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox — in which recipes carry the name of the woman who contributed them, as this one carries Miss Mattie Fullington's. The heavy use of blanched almonds points to a special-occasion cake: a pound of nuts, peeled by hand, was a real expenditure of money and labor, which may be why she felt entitled to call it the queen of all cakes.