Raspberry Debacle

There’s nothing intrinsically better about having an individual-serving cakelet rather than a slice of a communal cake. With a communal cake, the hungry people can have a big slice, the full people can have a little slice, and then when the full people realise they’re not full after all they can have a little more; it’s all very easy. With individual desserts, it’s one-size-fits-all, and unless you’re happy passing leftovers across the table, uneaten half-cakelets just sit there taunting anyone who would have liked seconds.

And yet cakes like these ones make me dissolve into envy: look! A whole cake for each person! Tiny muffins, too small to halve, are the same, and even cornish pasties: food that mustn’t be shared, food still in its ideal complete form, and it’s all yours so you can lick it if you like, or stick your face in it, or cut it into twelve tiny slices and eat them one at a time, and nobody can stop you. I’ve spent the last month intermittently yearning for some dessert rings, so that I too could mould perfect individual desserts; and then I realised that a dessert ring was essentially a £4 cylinder with a hole in the top, such as could be made by, say, cutting the bottom off a paper cup.

Using paper cups isn’t just cheap, it’s also historically appropriate, since paper cups were developed in response to the desire for individual servings. Until the late nineteenth century, communal drinking supplies mostly consisted of “some water” and “a single cup chained nearby”, which worked fine until people found out about germs:

In contrast to this staring death cup (as represented by the Minnesota Board of Health), early-twentieth-century paper cups were marketed as Health Kups, and in a culture postdating romanticism but predating goths, is it any surprise that the Health Kups were the more popular? Even church-goers were fretting about the crumbs floating in their single communion vessel, and digging up logical justifications of individual versions (sadly not marketed as Kommunion Kups):

It has also been claimed that Christ, when he said, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is for many,” pointed to that one cup which he had used, and thereby designated the use of one and only one cup. We shall for a moment concede them the point, however, we shall ask, Where is that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed? If that particular cup was “the blood of the New Testament,” then wherein are we justified in celebrating the Lord’s Supper, since we have not that cup? Again, were it possible to produce the identical cup which Christ used, how were it possible for all Christians to drink from that one cup? The absurdity of this argument against the individual cup lies in carrying it to its logical end; namely, producing that cup to which Christ is claimed to have pointed, and then use no other in administering the Sacrament. It would require long years for that one cup to make the circuit, and many would never have the divine pleasure of communing with Christ.

The societal fear of germs was of course a new and enormous thing, causing changes in everything from sanitation to fashion, playing a part in the decline of petticoats and beards: “it is detrimental to the health to allow our beards to grow into such germ-carriers, and in addition it is characteristic of laziness. Besides tickling the ladies they are a harbor for germs”. There are even slightly implausible stories of “a 1907 experiment in which two men kissed a young woman after walking through Paris”, one bearded and one unbearded, in order to compare germs ( “but of course it is vital for the experiment, Pierre! Now do it again, oui. And now you, Auguste. This time open your mouth, my little test subjects, we must get all the germs out, for science”).

In conclusion, we’ve established today that if you have a beard and want to rub it in some food, it’s probably best to go with individual servings instead of one big cake; and as individual servings go these are pretty delicious. (They’re also rabidly inappropriate for the end of winter, full of frozen raspberries and cold, but “seasonal appropriateness” versus “chance to use EXCITING NEW ICECREAM MACHINE that MAKES ICECREAM in the FREEZER and it goes WHIRR and ICECREAM” is a pretty uneven competition.)

Lemon and Almond Cake
(Based on that Claudia Roden flourless orange-cake recipe that everyone has a version of.)
2 lemons
150 grams sugar
150 grams ground almonds
4 eggs
1/2 teaspoon baking powder (gluten-free works fine)

Scrub the lemons, then cover them with water in a saucepan and boil for around an hour (take them out if they split open). Leave them to cool a little.

Line a 9×13 inch baking tray, and preheat the oven to 170C.

Tear open the lemons and fish the pips out. Puree the rest of the lemons, skin included.

Beat the eggs lightly, and then whisk in the lemon puree, then the sugar, baking powder and almonds.

Pour the batter into the lined tray and cook until a skewer inserted comes out clean or with moist crumbs clinging - it took around twenty minutes for me.

Lemon Gelati (requires an ice-cream machine)
(Based on this about.com recipe)
Zest of one orange
125ml milk
2 eggs, separated
4 tablespoons white sugar
Juice of two lemons
A few drops of yellow food colouring (optional)
250ml double cream

Heat the milk with the orange zest until the milk froths up, then leave it to cool.

Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until pale, and then mix in the lemon juice.

Add the cooled milk to the egg yolk mixture, passing it through a sieve to strain out the zest and any lumps, then heat the mixture until it thickens, stirring it a lot and making sure not to let it boil. Let it cool, then chill it in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Whip the cream, and fold it into the chilled mixture, along with the food colour if you want it to look lemony as well as just tasting lemony. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold those in as well. Put the mixture in the ice-cream machine and follow the manufacturer’s instructions until the gelati is the consistency of soft-serve ice-cream.

Assembly
12 paper cups
Lemon-almond cake
150g raspberries
Lemon gelati
A handful of almond slivers or almond flakes

Cut the bottoms out of six paper cups, so that they form slightly tapered cylinders.

From the lemon-almond cake, cut out six circles the same size or slightly smaller than the wide end of the paper cups (I used a pastry cutter, but using a knife to cut around the outside of a glass would work fine; the cake is a bit too crumby and thick for just pushing the glass through to work well).

Place the circles of cake on a lined baking tray, and place the six paper cups over them, wide-side-down. Drop about twenty grams of raspberries (around 12 raspberries) onto each circle through the hole at the top of each cup, so that they form a layer on top of the circles of cake and are stopped from falling off the edges by the paper cup. (Set aside at least six raspberries to put on top of the cakes at the end.)

Get out the lemon gelati, which should be about the texture of soft-serve ice-cream. If it’s too hard, leave it to soften for a little while. Drop two or three tablespoons onto each cake, through the hole at the top of the cup, reaching in with the spoon to poke it around if it’s all landed on one side.

Cut out six smaller circles from the remaining cake base, small enough to fit through the holes in the tops of the cups, and then place one on top of the gelati in each cup.

Divide the remaining gelati between the six cups, putting a dollop on top of each, then top that dollop with a raspberry and a few almond slivers.

Place the remaining six paper cups over the top of the cut-out paper cups (to stop ice forming on the cakes), and place the tray in the freezer for at least a couple of hours (and ideally not longer than six hours, or the raspberries might start to look grey, though they’ll still taste fine).

Serves six. To serve, remove from the cups. The gelati will almost certainly have stuck to the cups, but this means you can just pick the cup up whole and run a knife around the inside from the hole at the bottom; the cake should pop out easily.