Perfectly easy afternoon tea cakes that will impress your guests.
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.
