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Tipsy Cake
I large sponge cake 1 gill (1½ cup) sherry wine 1 gill (1/2 cup) brandy 1/2 pints (3 cups) boiled custard 1 gill (1/2 cup) blanched almonds Bake a sponge cake in a fancy mold and allow it to become stale. Place the cake on a dish, and pour over the sherry and brandy; as it runs round Cakes the dish, spoon it up and pour over again; continue in this way until the liquor is all used up. Blanch the almonds, cut them in strips, and stick them all over the cake. At serving time place the cake on a pretty dish and pour the custard round.
Serve cold.
A Victorian trifle in its oldest form: one whole cake soaked in spirits, spiked with almonds, and moated with custard. Nothing is cooked at the last stage, so success depends entirely on the cake's dryness and the custard's thickness.
- The cake must be staleA fresh sponge goes sodden and breaks up under the liquor. Bake it a day or two ahead and leave it uncovered, or dry a bought sponge in a low (about 300F) oven for 15-20 minutes and cool it completely.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself notes. Total liquor here is one cup, split evenly between sherry and brandy, absorbed by a single cake -- potent, and not a dessert for children.
- Custard quantityThree cups of boiled custard is meant, poured around the base rather than over the top. Read the measure as 1 1/2 pints; the fraction on the pints has not survived cleanly in this printing.
- Boiled custardPeriod shorthand for a stirred custard sauce rather than a baked one, usually cooked gently or over water. The recipe gives no formula; about six egg yolks to three cups of milk, sugar to taste, stirred to 175-180F until it coats a spoon, will serve. It must not reach a simmer or it will scramble.
- Spooning the liquorThis is the hinge. Pour in small amounts and keep returning what pools on the dish to the top of the cake; a single flood runs straight off a domed sponge and leaves the crumb dry.
- Blanched almondsPour boiling water over whole raw almonds, let them stand a minute, and slip off the skins. Cut them lengthwise into spikes while still damp -- dried nuts split and crumble.
- The fancy moldThe recipe does not say which; a turban, Turk's head or plain ring would all suit. A ring is easiest to serve, since the custard fills the centre as well as the surround.
- Chilling and yieldAssemble the soaking several hours ahead and refrigerate; add the custard only at the table so the cake does not sit in it. A standard sponge serves eight to ten.
Tipsy cake, or tipsy parson, was a fixture of English and American dessert tables from the late eighteenth century onward and is a close relative of trifle -- the same cake, wine and custard -- though trifle is the older dish, recorded from the sixteenth century and already made with soaked cake, wine and custard in the eighteenth. The name is plain enough: the cake is drunk. It is often said to have solved a household problem, offering a respectable use for a stale or broken cake, and many versions ask that the sponge be a day or more old.