Category: Recipes

Perfectly easy afternoon tea cakes that will impress your guests.

• Jelly-Rolls
• Daisy cakes
• Medallion fruit-cakes
• Cherry Cakes
• Domino Cakes
• Hemispheres

Jelly-Rolls

Take a fresh layer of sponge-cake, and while it is still warm cut off the edges, spread it with jelly, and roll it into a cylinder.

Then roll it in a stiff paper and tie it with a string. If the cake is not over-baked and is rolled while hot it will not crack. The paper will keep it in shape.

Dust with icing sugar.

Daisy cakes

Drop separate spoonfuls of sponge cake mixture at intervals on a baking sheet. Bake in a hot oven for a few minutes only, and watch carefully that the edges do not burn. The cakes will spread, rising in the center, and be thin on the edges.

Spread the flat sides with green colored icing. Blanch some almonds, split them, and cut them in strips. Arrange them in a circle, and place in the center a little yellow icing, or use white icing to create the daisy petals.

Medallion fruit-cakes

Use a sponge- or a cupcake mixture and bake it in gem-pans. If they rise in the center cut off the tops to even them out.

Invert them, and with a small cutter stamp a circle in the center of each one and take out a thin layer of the cake. Cover the rest of the cakes with icing, or the cakes may be moistened with water and then rubbed over with powdered sugar to whiten them.

Place a piece of preserved peach or other fruit, in the small hole you have made and serve.

Cherry Cakes

Cut a layer of any kind of cake into pieces three inches long and two and a quarter wide.

Ice the pieces and decorate with candied cherries cut in halves with small strips of angelica imitating stems, and angelica cut in diamond-shaped pieces imitating leaves.

Domino Cakes

Cut a layer of cake into two pieces. Cover one with chocolate icing and the other with white icing. While the icing is still soft cut the cake, using a sharp knife, into pieces three inches long and one and a half inches wide.

Put a little decorating icing into a pastry bag with a plain tube with a small opening, and press it through on to the cakes in dots and lines to imitate dominoes. Use white icing for the chocolate pieces, and the same icing mixed with cocoa powder for the white pieces.

Hemispheres

¼ cupful of butter

¼ cupful of powdered sugar

¾ cupful of pastry flour

½ teaspoonful of vanilla

Yolks of two eggs.

Cream together the butter and sugar, add the yolks and flavoring, and then the flour. Make it into balls one inch in diameter, by rolling small portions of the mixture between the hands.

Roll the balls in powdered sugar and place them on a hemisphere tin. Bake them in a moderate oven for ten to fifteen minutes.

Remove and cool. Cover the flat sides of the cakes with icing of different colors and ornament with decorating icing.

We love the advice that many vintage recipes have for baking beautiful cakes. In this post, we have collected the best secrets for baking perfect cakes.

Eggs

The freshest eggs make the lightest cakes. You can also get lighter cakes by beating your eggs in a warm dry place. A small pinch of baking soda sometimes has the same effect.

In making cakes it is particularly necessary that the eggs should be well beaten. When beating the surface should look smooth and level, become as thick boiled custard.

The whites of eggs should be beaten until they become stiff, with no liquid in the bottom. You can check if it is stiff enough by seeing if it will stick to a fork without dropping off.

Creaming Butter and Sugar

Butter and sugar should be beaten (creamed) until it looks like thick cream, and it stands up in the pan. It should be kept cool. If too warm, it will make the cakes heavy.

Baking Pans

If large cakes are baked in tin pans, the bottom and sides should be covered with sheets of baking paper before the mixture is put in.

Sponge cakes and Almond cakes should be baked in pans that are as thin as possible.

If the cakes should get burnt, scrape them with a knife or grater, as soon as they are cool.

Always be careful to butter your pans well. Should the cakes stick, they cannot be removed without breaking.

For queen cakes, the small tins of a round or oval shape are most convenient. Fill them just a little more than half full with batter.

When the cake is baked, let it remain in the tin until it is cold. Then set it in the oven a minute, or just long enough to warm the tin through. Remove it from the oven; turn it upside down, tap the edge of the tin on the table and it will slip out with ease, leaving it whole.

Substitutions

Water can be used in place of milk in all dough.

Where any recipe calls for baking powder, and you do not have it, you can use cream of tartar and soda, in the proportion of one level teaspoonful of soda to two of cream of tartar.

When the recipe calls for sweet milk or cream, and you do not have it, you may use in place of it sour milk or cream, but not sour enough to whey or to be watery.

More Secrets For Baking Perfect Cakes

Flour should always be sifted before using it.

Eggs should be well beaten. For the best results whisk the whites and yolks separately, the yolks to a thick cream, the whites until they are a stiff froth.

Always stir the butter and sugar into a cream, then add the beaten yolks, then the milk, the flavoring, then the beaten whites, and, lastly, the flour.

While the cake is baking avoid opening the oven door, only when necessary to see that the cake is baking properly. The oven needs to remain at a moderate heat, not too cold or too hot. A cake is often spoiled by being looked at too often when first put into the oven.

If, after the cake is put in the oven, it seems to bake too fast, put brown paper loosely over the top of the pan, while being careful that it does not touch the cake, and then do not open the door for five minutes at least. Then quickly check the cake and the door shut carefully, or the rush of cold air will cause it to fall. Setting a small dish of hot water in the oven will also prevent the cake from scorching.

To check when the cake is done, run a wooden skewer into the middle of it; if it comes out clean and smooth, the cake is ready.

Never stir cake after the butter and sugar are creamed, but beat it down from the bottom, up and over; this laps air into the cake batter, and produces little air cells, which cause the dough to puff and swell when it comes in contact with the heat while cooking.

When making most cakes, especially sponge cake, the flour should be added little by little, stirred very slowly and lightly, for if stirred hard and fast it will make it porous and tough.

FROSTING OR ICING.

Before you ice a cake cover it all over with flour and then wipe the flour off. This will enable you to spread the icing more evenly.

Before you cut an ice cake, cut the icing by itself with a small sharp penknife. The large knife with which you divide the cake, will crack and break the icing.

Spread the frosting with a broad knife evenly over the cake, and if it seems too thin, beat in a little more sugar. Cover the cake with two coats, the second after the first has become dry, or nearly so. If the icing gets too dry or stiff before the last coat is needed, it can be thinned sufficiently with a little water, enough to make it work smoothly.

A little lemon juice, or half a teaspoonful of tartaric acid, added to the frosting while being beaten, makes it white and more frothy.

The flavors mostly used for frosting are lemon, vanilla, almond, rose, chocolate and orange.