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Cup Cake Surprise
Make hard sauce (see below). Peel and cut up four good sized peaches. Add to hard sauce and set in the refrigerator or other cool place an hour or more. Serve on cup cakes made according to plain cake recipe (page 46). Strawberries or canned crushed pineapple may be used in the same way. 1/2 ounce chocolate
A no-cook dessert topping: fruit folded into hard sauce and chilled until firm, then spooned over small plain cakes. It depends entirely on the hard sauce being stiff enough to hold its shape.
- Hard sauce, in case you have never made oneHard sauce is creamed butter and sifted confectioners' sugar, commonly something like 1/2 cup butter to 1 1/2 cups sugar, beaten pale and flavoured with vanilla or a spirit. It contains no eggs and is never heated; the "hard" is usually taken to refer to its chilled firmness.
- Chill is structuralThe hour in the cool place is not resting time, it is setting time. Butter-based sauce that has warmed to room temperature will slide off the cake as an oily pool rather than sitting on it.
- Peaches must be dryFour good-sized peaches will give roughly three cups of cut fruit and a good deal of juice. Drain the cut fruit before folding it in, or the liquid will thin the sauce and make it separate and weep.
- Canned pineappleDrain it hard and press out the syrup. Crushed pineapple as sold now sits in far more liquid than the fruit will hold, and the syrup thins the sauce badly.
- StrawberriesHull and quarter, and do not sugar them first; the sauce is already very sweet and macerated berries release still more juice.
- Cup cakesThese are plain butter cakes baked in small tins, closer to a modern unfrosted cupcake than to anything iced; the recipe simply refers you to the plain cake recipe on page 46, and the topping supplies all the richness needed.
- YieldThe quantity of fruit and sauce given here would dress perhaps eight to ten small cakes, though the recipe gives no number. It is best assembled at the table, since the sauce softens quickly once it meets the cake.
Hard sauce is generally traced to the nineteenth-century pudding tradition, where it is often said to have been the standard accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings, its firmness melting into the hot dessert; the term itself is chiefly nineteenth-century American, and in Britain the brandy-flavoured relative is still called brandy butter. What happens here is a mid-century American inversion: the sauce is folded with cold fresh fruit and served over cake instead, turning a winter pudding sauce into a summer dessert. The alternatives offered are the giveaway of the period. Fresh peaches or strawberries in season, canned crushed pineapple all year round, and a plain cake baked at home, so that one basic batter could be dressed a dozen different ways.