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Log of Wood Cake
1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar I lemon 1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) butter Few drops red color Strawberry jam Marzipan icing Coffee or chocolate fondant Few blanched 2 little robins and chopped pistachio nuts Grate the rind of the lemon into a basin, add the eggs and sugar, and beat over a pan of boiling water. Remove from the hot water when thick Cakes and white and beat until cold, then add the flour, baking powder and the butter, melted. Color one-half pink with red color and leave the other half yellow. Bake the mixture in two flat buttered tins about twelve inches square; it should be an inch in thickness when baked. Let cool, and then cut in long strips, spread each strip with sieved strawberry jam, and place them together, one pink and one yellow alternately, three or four in a row, and one row above the other until you have the same number each way. Press them all together and roll up in a piece of white paper until stuck. Form knots with round pieces of marzipan icing, cover these knots and the ends of the cake with fondant icing and mark them with a little melted chocolate or brown color. Put some chocolate or coffee fondant icing into a bag with a tube and force it along the sides and top of the cake to represent the bark of a tree, then sprinkle over with a few chopped pistachio nuts and decorate with two little robins and a pink flower and three green leaves made of marzipan. 1 To make fondant icing. Put three pounds of sugar into a saucepan, add two cupfuls of cold water, and stir over the fire until the sugar is dissolved. Then add one tablespoonful of glucose, and allow it to boil until it forms a soft ball in cold water. Let the bubbles die down, and pour into a basin which has been rinsed out with cold water. When you can bear your finger in the middle, begin to cream it, and when thick, put your hands in and knead and squeeze until it is a solid, firm, creamy mass. Then flavor and color it and it is ready for use.
To make marzipan icing: Mix in a basin ten ounces of fondant with eight ounces of ground almonds. Boil two cupfuls of sugar with two cupfuls of water to soft ball. During the boiling add a pinch of cream of tartar and one tablespoonful of almond extract, then pour it quickly on to the ingredients in basin. Get some one to hold the basin firmly for you, while with a wooden spoon you stir as quickly as you can as the mass begins to harden; turn out on to a clean baking- Cakes board and knead and roll until it is smooth.
Color it while it is warm. It will keep for three weeks. Should it be too hard when you want to work it, add a few drops of lukewarm water and knead it, or roll it out with a rolling-pin until it becomes soft and pliable.
A whisked genoise baked in two sheets, tinted pink and plain, then cut into strips and layered so the cut ends read as a chequerboard of growth rings before the whole thing is bandaged into a log. The decoration is confectioner's work; the cake itself is straightforward once the egg foam is right.
- The missing egg countThe method calls for eggs but no number is given, and the ingredient list as printed does not name them at all. On the usual English sponge reckoning of an egg to an ounce of sugar and an ounce of flour, something in the region of eight whole eggs would fit; treat that as a guess, not as the book's instruction, and judge by the batter, which should ribbon thickly from the whisk.
- The hinge: beat the foam to full volume, then cool itSugar, eggs and lemon rind are warmed over a pan of boiling water only to help the foam build. Take the bowl off the heat while the mixture is thick and pale, and keep beating until it is completely cold before the flour goes in. Warm foam plus melted butter collapses; the two teaspoonfuls of baking powder are the only other lift.
- Folding in the butterMelted butter should be barely warm and trickled down the side of the bowl in stages, folded with a spatula. Poured in at once it sinks and leaves a greasy seam at the bottom of the sheet.
- Pans and depthTwo twelve-inch square tins are called for, but the quantity of batter will not give an inch of depth in pans that size. Expect sheets closer to half an inch, which is what you want for strips that roll and press together. Butter and line the tins with parchment.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A shallow genoise sheet wants a moderately hot oven, 350-375F, for roughly 12-18 minutes, until the surface springs back and the edges just begin to shrink from the tin.
- Weights and volumes1/2 lb sugar is about 1 cup, 1/2 lb flour about 2 cups by the book's own reckoning; modern cup measures of flour run heavier, so weigh if you can. 6 oz butter is 12 tablespoons. Two cupfuls of water in the fondant is 16 fl oz.
- Soft ball, in numbersBoth the fondant and the marzipan syrup are boiled to soft ball, which is 235-240F on a sugar thermometer. Glucose can be replaced measure for measure with corn syrup; it is there to keep the fondant from graining. For the fondant, let it stand until the bubbles have died down before pouring, and do not stir it while it cools; the marzipan syrup, by contrast, is poured onto the almonds at once.
- The marzipan icing is not almond pasteThis is a fondant-and-ground-almond confection set with hot syrup, closer to a poured marzipan than to the kneaded egg-and-sugar kind. It stiffens fast, hence the instruction to have someone hold the bowl. Have the board floured with icing sugar and ready before you pour.
- The robins and the colourThe flower and leaves are marzipan; the two little robins are listed as a separate item and may be modelled or may be bought ornaments, the sentence will bear either reading. Nothing in this recipe involves an actual bird. "Few drops red color" means enough to tint half the batter a pale pink, and modern gel colours go much further than the old liquids, so add on a skewer tip.
- Rolling in paperThe paper is a former, not a wrapper to bake in. Press the assembled strips together, roll firmly in parchment and leave until the jam has set the block, an hour or more in a cool place, before you ice it.
- YieldTwo twelve-inch sheets make a substantial log, enough for a good many slices depending how thickly you cut. The fondant recipe makes far more than one cake needs and keeps well wrapped airtight.
This is a Yule log, and it is worth noticing how differently it is built from the French bûche that comes to mind instead.