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Bavarian Tart or Pie
Make three thin layer cakes from a good recipe, and put them together with a stiff filling of whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with strawberry juice. Cover the top and sides with icing of the same flavor, both pink and daintily made. Serve, sliced, for dessert. Decorate the top with candied cherries and leaves of citron, cut thin, in a wreath. This is a good and very pretty cake, though called a tart.
An assembly recipe rather than a formula: the book assumes you already own a layer cake recipe and know how to whip cream. The points below fill in what it leaves unsaid.
- The cake layers"Three thin layer cakes" means three thin rounds, not three separate cakes. The book gives no pan size or baking instruction at all; a plain butter cake or sponge divided between three 8- or 9-inch pans works well in a modern oven. Whatever the pan, the layers should be slim enough that the cream, not the crumb, dominates.
- Strawberry juice is the hingeFresh berry juice is mostly water and will slacken whipped cream and thin an icing to a drip. Reduce the juice hard in a saucepan until it is syrupy and cool it completely before use, or use freeze-dried strawberry powder for colour and flavour without added liquid.
- "Stiff filling of whipped cream"Cream then was not standardised as it is now and could be considerably richer than a modern carton, though it varied. Whip to firm peaks, and consider stabilising it, or the filling may slump. Use heavy cream at 36 percent or more and keep the bowl cold.
- Icing of the same flavourA pink icing of this kind would be confectioners' sugar beaten with a little liquid, coloured and flavoured by the strawberry juice itself, spread thin enough to set. "Daintily made" suggests smooth and pale rather than a thick, heavily buttered frosting.
- CitronThe citron called for is candied citron peel, sold in blocks around the winter holidays, not the whole fruit and not lemon. Slice it very thin and cut leaf shapes with a small knife; candied angelica was the other common green in this decoration.
- Keep it coldA cream-filled cake is a refrigerator cake. Assemble it a few hours before serving, chill it, and do not leave it standing at room temperature through a long dinner.
- YieldIf baked in 8-inch pans, 10 to 12 slices. It slices most cleanly with a long thin blade wiped between cuts.
The odd title looks like a translation problem rather than a mistake in the kitchen. German Torte means a layer cake, and "tart" is the nearest English cognate (both go back to Latin torta), which may be why the author adds the closing note that the thing is really a cake. What the recipe preserves is the shape of a Central European cream torte: thin layers with a whipped filling and a decorated top, finished with the candied cherries and thin-cut citron that were standard cake-decorating stock.