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Cakes for Little Folks
Break two eggs in a tea cup and fill with thick, sweet cream, add one cup of sugar and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder sifted with two cups of flour; beat thoroughly and bake in patty jars, in the center of each put a very tiny china doll. The dolls will be raised in various forms. Use either white or chocolate frosting.
A small, sweet cream cake baked in individual tins, essentially a fortune-cake trick dressed up for a children's party. The batter itself is sound; the ornament in the middle is the problem.
- The china dollLeave it out. A glazed bisque figurine small enough to sit in a patty cake is a choking hazard for exactly the age group named in the title, and antique or import china of this period may carry lead or cadmium in the glaze. If you want the surprise, hide a whole almond or a candied cherry, and tell the children it is there.
- "A tea cup" of eggs and creamPeriod teacup measures are not standard; reckon somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz. Break the eggs in first, then add cream only to bring the total to the cup's mark, whatever that comes to. "Thick, sweet cream" means unsoured heavy cream, not cultured.
- Patty jarsSmall individual tins — a standard 12-cup muffin pan is the closest modern equivalent, filled about two-thirds. Paper liners make sense here since the batter is rich and will stick.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean; small cakes with this much sugar brown fast at the edges.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is about the modern proportion, so today's double-acting powder will give an adequate rise. Sift it through the flour as directed rather than dumping it in.
- Beating"Beat thoroughly" is the period instruction; with a mixer, stop as soon as the flour disappears -- overworking gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- YieldAbout a dozen small cakes. Frost only after they are completely cool, or the icing slides.
Baking a small token into a cake is far older than this book -- the bean in the Twelfth Night cake, the ring and thimble in a Halloween barmbrack -- and by the late nineteenth century the custom appears in American entertaining as party favours for children, with charms, coins and tiny bisque dolls doing the work of the old bean. Small china dolls of this kind were a cheap mass-market German export, later widely known to collectors as "frozen Charlottes," and small enough to disappear into a cupcake. Turn-of-the-century household books commonly treated the children's party as a distinct branch of entertaining, with its own scaled-down foods, and a cake that produced a doll was as much a parlour amusement as a dessert.