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To Ornament a Jelly Cake
Trim off the edge of the jelly cake, then give it a thin coating of water icing (see water icing); next have a cone of white icing ready. To the more fully illustrate this, I will request you to follow out the pattern in my design (Page 353). After you have made that one, you can do any other you choose, as that one explains the whole. Now with the cone of white (or pink sugar, if you prefer it), pipe on the white lines in the sketch (see sketch); now fill in between these lines with fruit jelly (use a cone filled with jelly for this purpose); next, with the leaf cone, pipe on the leaves for the grapes (as described in diagrams for Artistic Piping, No. 38); then with a plain round cone pipe on the grapes, as described in No. 39, in diagrams. (See diagrams. The edge is simple plain dots of white sugar. See diagram No. 2.) I would here remark, if you so wish it you can pipe on the bunch of grapes with fruit jelly instead of sugar. You can also use chocolate ice instead of water ice for the top. Then pipe it in sugar and jelly as before, or ice it with jelly instead of either chocolate or water icing. In that case, where before you used jelly between the white lines of sugar, now use chocolate or pink icing. Or if you wish, you can dispense with the top icing of either jelly, chocolate, or water icing, and simply work out the design as shown in the white piping and jelly. But the foregoing is the most artistic; and I would here remark that what I give here is given simply for the instruction of those who wish to do artistic work; to others the instructions will be valueless. But my experience teaches me that most ladies have a taste for the ornamental, and wish to show it in this particular, as well as in others. And what would appear difficult to others will be easy to them; and I promise them they will be rewarded for their pains when they see how successful they are.
This is a decorating method rather than a formula, and it leans on cross-references and plate illustrations that rarely survive in reprints. What follows translates the vocabulary and the working conditions.
- The missing diagramsThe design on "Page 353" and the numbered piping diagrams are engravings from the original plates and are usually absent or illegible in digital copies. Treat the text as a general method: outline a motif in white, flood the spaces with jelly, then build grapes and leaves on top.
- "Cone" means a paper coneThe icing here is piped from a cone rolled from stiff paper or parchment, with the tip snipped off or a small metal tube inserted. A disposable parchment cornet or a small zip bag with a snipped corner behaves the same way; "leaf cone" and "plain round cone" are simply a leaf tip and a small round tip.
- Water icingWater icing of this period is generally a plain glace icing: confectioners' sugar slaked with just enough water to pour, without egg or fat, setting to a thin matte shell. Check the book's own "water icing" entry for its proportions. "Chocolate ice" here, used "for the top" in place of water icing, means such a glaze with chocolate or cocoa worked in, not a frozen dessert.
- White icing for pipingThe piping icing is almost certainly a stiff royal-style icing, sugar beaten with egg white until it holds a sharp point, though the text refers the reader elsewhere for it. It must be much firmer than the flooding icing or the lines will spread into the jelly. If raw egg white is a concern, use meringue powder or pasteurised whites.
- The jelly is the hingeUse a firm, clear fruit jelly, warmed only until it will just flow and then pressed through a sieve. If it is too warm or too loose it will run under the piped white lines and blur the whole design; if it is cold and lumpy it will tear them. Let the base glaze set hard before any jelly touches it.
- "Jelly cake"In this book a jelly cake is a plain layer cake sandwiched with fruit jelly, not a gelatine dessert. Trimming the edge, as directed, gives a clean vertical face for the border of dots.
- Pink sugarNineteenth-century pink normally came from cochineal or carmine; modern gel colour gives the same effect with far less liquid, which matters because extra water slackens piping icing.
- Working orderGlaze, dry, pipe outlines, dry again briefly, flood with jelly, then add leaves and grapes last so the raised work is not smeared. Allow an hour or two of drying overall in a dry room; humidity keeps glace icing tacky.
Ornamental piping of this kind belongs to the late nineteenth-century vogue for confectioner's work done at home. Professional pastry cooks had been working with paper cornets and stiff egg-white icing for some decades before this, and the instructional, first-person voice here, addressed to "ladies" who "have a taste for the ornamental," reads like a contributed chapter rather than the compilers' general recipes. The Dixie Cook-Book, one of the large regional compendiums of the 1880s, is typical in devoting plates and diagrams to such work: an ornamented cake was a household display piece at a time when store-bought decorated cakes were a city luxury.