Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Puff Cake
Puff Cake
Mrs. Sam. McMaster.
One cup of sugar, one of flour, three eggs, three teaspoons cold water, two of Cook's Friend baking powder, a pinch of salt; bake in sponge cake pans.
THE PASTE FOR ABOVE. - One cup of milk, one tablespoon of corn starch, one egg, a pinch of salt; cook like boiled custard; split each cake open with a knife and fill the space with the paste, taking care not to let any appear outside the cakes, These may be made extra nice by icing with chocolate dressing.
A fatless sponge split and filled with cornstarch custard — essentially a Boston cream pie in miniature. Two details in the original need attention before you start: the leavening is heavy by modern standards, and the filling contains no sugar at all.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand (McLaren's) that has been sold since the 19th century and is still available in Canada. Any double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one.
- Reduce the baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is roughly double the modern proportion, a legacy of weaker and less reliable powders. One to one and a quarter teaspoons is enough; more gives a coarse crumb and a faint metallic taste.
- The filling has no sugarAs written, the paste is milk, cornstarch, egg and salt, and the icing is offered only as an optional extra, so the assembled cake is bland by any modern palate. Two to three tablespoons of sugar and a little vanilla bring it into line with what most people expect from a pastry cream.
- "Cook like boiled custard"Whisk the cornstarch into the cold milk, heat it stirring until it thickens, then temper a little of the hot mixture into the beaten egg before returning it to the pan. Cornstarch custards must actually reach a boil for a minute to cook out the starch, unlike plain egg custard, which must not.
- Sponge cake pansShallow round tins rather than a loaf or tube pan; something in the region of 8 inches suits the quantities, though no size is given. The recipe has you bake the layers and split each one, giving four thin rounds in all.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A fatless sponge of this size wants 350F for 18 to 22 minutes, until the top springs back and the edges pull from the tin.
- Splitting and fillingCool the cakes completely and chill the paste before assembling. Warm cake tears, and warm custard runs out at the edges — precisely what the instruction "taking care not to let any appear outside" is warning against.
- Chocolate dressingPeriod cookbooks generally use 'dressing' for a poured icing; a chocolate one would typically be chocolate melted with a little water or milk and beaten with icing sugar. A simple ganache or a chocolate glaze does the same job.
- YieldTwo layers, filled and iced, cut into 8 to 10 servings. Best eaten the day it is made; the custard softens the sponge overnight.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and is generally credited as the first fundraising community cookbook published in Canada — a form imported from the United States, where church and charity cookbooks had multiplied after the Civil War. Recipes carry the name of the contributing housewife, as this one does, which is why the book reads as a directory of a social circle as much as a kitchen manual. The dish itself belongs to the large family of split sponge cakes filled with cornstarch-thickened custard current in North American home baking by the 1860s and 1870s; the same idea, baked in a pie plate and glazed with chocolate, is close to what came to be known as Boston cream pie, though that name and the chocolate glaze have a tangled history of their own. Cornstarch was the enabling ingredient — cheap, shelf-stable and widely marketed from the 1850s onward, it let a cook thicken a custard with far fewer eggs. The naming of a commercial baking powder in the ingredient list is also of its moment. Cook's Friend, a McLaren's product, was one of the brands competing for the Canadian household market in this period, and a community cookbook could serve as informal advertisement for whichever tin the contributor happened to keep on her shelf.