How to Make Gertrude à la Crème – The Victorian Way

Ah, season's greetings. As we're in the middle of the festive season, things are a little busy with all the entertaining. I like to have a few things in the store cupboard that I can turn into dishes for dinner to make life a little easier should there be unexpected guests. Today I'm from one of my favourite recipe books written by Eliza Acton. For this recipe you will need slightly stale sponge cake, eggs, sugar, cream, a selection of preserves, crystallised fruit and flowers, almond paste and food colouring. This recipe is one of many I have for using up stale sponge cakes. I always make a second sponge cake whenever I make one. I'm going to slice the cake horizontally with equal slices and then for each slice I'll just cut out the centre. Then spread different coloured jams over each slice. It's an ideal way of using up some of the half jars in the back of the cupboard. I have blackberry, lime and lemon, strawberry and apricot. And then once I've spread them I'll stack it back up again. This time of year is really very busy and there's only four of us so we have to be more organised than usual. After all we don't just make breakfast, luncheon, dinner and supper for Lord and Lady Braybrooke and their guests, but also four meals for just under 30 indoor servants. And the upper servants and the lower and fancy cakes and such like in and we rarely bake our own bread. There are several women locally that I use to do the rougher work, leaving my maids to work here in the kitchen. ice a cake. It's not quite royal icing and not quite meringue. I'm going to whisk my egg whites name, Gertrude. I think it was probably supposed to be Guerlain, which means garland in French. I understand Eliza Acton spent some time in France, but she calls it Gertrude and so shall I. Now you don't need to worry too much about your icing. You can cover up mistakes by adding some decoration. I'm now going to put the cake into a very slow oven to let it dry out. I've already started decorating my cake using some candied fruit, but while it was drying I made some leaf shapes out of some almond paste, which I mixed with food colouring and then rolled it out and used my cutters. You can get many different shapes of cutters nowadays. I'm going to stick the shapes on using some royal icing. Synthetic food colourings like this have been around for about 10 years now. I think they come from the coal industry. There were even some when I was training. I remember us being very excited when Mauve arrived. I still insist that the girls learn how to make food colouring in the old traditional way. The spinach for green, carrots for orange, centre. I'm filling the centre of the cake, or garland, with whipped cream. You must make sure you get right down to the bottom. I'm going to finish the decoration with some sugared flowers